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The office space at Southport was ready for tenants right around the time the pandemic hit, delaying occupancy. Marcie Palmer sent me this beautiful photo showing the lights finally on in the Southport offices, to the left of the Boeing factory. The lit up space will soon be occupied by Renton’s own global trend-setting game designer, Wizards of the Coast.
It’s appropriate for Wizards of the Coast to settle in next to Boeing. When I was a systems engineer at Boeing, I worked with engineers that had regularly played a pre-production version of “Magic the Gathering” with their colleague Peter Atkison during their 40-minute lunch breaks. “He would bring new hand-drawn cards for us to evaluate every week” they told me. Mr. Atkison had started a small side business, “Wizards of the Coast”, which took its name from the adventuring group he and his friends had created when they played “Dungeons and Dragons.” Mr. Atkison was close friends with a gamer named Richard Garfield, the creative inventor of Magic the Gathering (and also a great-great-grandson of US President James Garfield). Peter Atkison’s small company was working to bring Richard Garfield’s product to the market, and his fellow nerds at Boeing were an outstanding test market.
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