Inside the Star Wars CCG: Secrets from Decipher (transcript)
Inside the Star Wars CCG: Secrets from Decipher (23 November 2025) is an interview by the Imperial Remnant YouTube channel with Jason Winter, who worked in Decipher's product development team from February 1996 to January 1998, answering rules questions, contributing to design and running tournaments. Participants: the Imperial Remnant host (interviewer), Jason Winter.
Source: Inside the Star Wars CCG: Secrets from Decipher, Imperial Remnant, YouTube (23 November 2025).
The text below is from the video's automatic captions, corrected for names and card titles; it has not yet been checked against the audio. Words that could not be made out are marked [unclear].
Transcript[edit]
[00:01] Interviewer: Well, Jason, thanks for taking the time to come on. Just to give people a quick catch-up: I had made a video on the Star Wars Customizable Card Game from Decipher, and you had commented on it, and you worked for Decipher at the time. You had a lot of cool insight that you posted, but I also thought it'd be cool to sit down and really get a firsthand account of how everything went.
[00:26] Jason Winter: Yeah, it's kind of amazing how much I can remember, it being now almost 30 years ago.
[00:30] Interviewer: I know. When I was doing that video, I was like, man, this is a blast from the past. This was my teenage years summed up, and I haven't taken these things out of the closet since they were put in the closet.
[00:39] Jason Winter: Yeah, this was basically my job right out of college. I had a little temp job for a few months in the town where I lived, and then I got out here to Virginia and did that.
[00:49] Interviewer: Well, let's start there. What was the job itself? It just seems so abstract. I understand how someone becomes an accountant, you know what I mean?
[01:00] Jason Winter: Yeah, exactly. So my first Gen Con was 1993, and when I went there, first of all, Wizards of the Coast had a little 10-by-10 booth, because this was about a month after Magic released. So they were a nobody back then, but half the convention was in that booth the whole time. That's what I remember most about that. But also there was Decipher, and they were showing off their Star Trek VCR game. I remember sitting playing that for a little bit. Then the next year, in '94, was when they were showing off the Star Trek CCG, and I spent basically the entire convention at their booth playing it, even occasionally running demos for other people once I learned how to play the game. I remember they had an actor there dressed up as a Klingon to play against you. That was pretty cool. And so that got me in with them a little bit. I got to know some of the people there, like you mentioned, Tom Braunlich and Rollie Tesh. They were the main creators of the Star Trek game, and later the Star Wars game.
[01:50] Jason Winter: So I continued a conversation with Tom throughout the rest of that year. At that point I was a junior in college; '94 was the summer between my junior and senior year. So that next year, '94–'95, I stayed in touch with Tom, then went to Gen Con in '95, and that was when Star Trek had released—November, December, something like that—so that's when they were actually running tournaments and doing all sorts of different stuff. So that's when I again hung out there, helped them run the tournament a little bit, did some demos at the booth. So that's basically all it was back then. And that's kind of what it is even now, a little bit, if you're active in the community. More so now: you can do stuff on the internet, do YouTube videos, Twitch streams or whatever, like this, for instance. It's the same sort of thing. I just hung out with them when I could at the Gen Cons and so forth, and I kept up with Tom. Tom at the time, in addition to being a designer for Star Trek, was also running the question-and-answer stuff: people would email in questions, and he'd have to answer them. So when he was looking to step away from that, I said, hey, I could do that, and they agreed. So there I was. I got the job that way.
[03:03] Interviewer: So it's kind of that classic story of: be a fan first.
[03:04] Jason Winter: Exactly.
[03:08] Interviewer: You said Magic came out in '93, and then Star Trek was '95?
[03:13] Jason Winter: '94, like late '94. I remember actually buying some cards, I think, when I went home for Thanksgiving in '94, so it was like November. That was the first cards I bought.
[03:20] Interviewer: I guess my experience in this world is kind of limited to Star Wars—well, I guess Young Jedi after that, but that was a flash in the pan compared to Star Wars and Magic. Were Magic and Star Trek, and then going into the Star Wars game, the first of their kind?
[03:33] Jason Winter: Yeah. Funny—so, I'll mention this: the only thing I ever wanted to correct you on in your video is how you pronounced Scrye. [Laughter]
[03:38] Interviewer: Oh, I've gotten so many comments on that, and I'm like, I'm so sorry, I've only ever seen it written.
[03:44] Jason Winter: Well, the thing is, I worked for Scrye after leaving Decipher, and we actually did a book on every collectible card game. We did two of them, actually. So Magic was the first, and that was the only one that came out in '93. Star Trek was at the end of '94, and—I'd have to look at the book now—like six or seven CCGs came out then. Spellfire was one of them, the TSR one, and a few others I'm blanking on at the moment. So that was like the seventh or eighth CCG or something like that. And '95 was the year everything came out. Like 40 CCGs came out that year, including Star Wars toward the end.
[04:18] Interviewer: Okay, that makes sense, because I remember the game—I was like 13 when I found it, maybe—I remember it being ultra-complicated to learn how to play. And then someone tried to teach me Magic when I was like a year into the Star Wars game, and I remember playing a few games, but it never clicked. So I was just wondering if these more complicated card games were a thing leading up to it, if it was kind of paving the way. And it seems like the answer is a little bit of both.
[04:44] Jason Winter: Well, that's the reason why they had a guy whose job was just to answer the rules. [Laughter] One guy for Star Trek, and another guy came on to do Star Wars. It was a little bit of both, in the sense that some games did lean into that a lot more, other games not so much. And especially once you got to the time of Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh and that sort of thing, and Young Jedi, that's when it became really a lot more simple, for the most part.
[05:10] Interviewer: Yeah, Young Jedi was like, you read the rulebook and you're playing 15 minutes later.
[05:13] Jason Winter: Basically. And that's the idea. You look at the same thing in video games: a lot of video games were the super complex, crunchy things, and now you have Animal Crossing or whatever, something that you can just get into.
[05:26] Interviewer: Right. People who loved, say, the Star Wars Customizable Card Game loved it because it was difficult. I remember, once I figured it out and I could sit down and play a game with someone else who knew it, I felt like I was part of something kind of exclusive.
[05:37] Jason Winter: Yeah. "That sense of pride and accomplishment," as Electronic Arts would say. You earned it.
[05:45] Interviewer: So your first role with Decipher was answering the other confused people trying to play the game.
[05:51] Jason Winter: Exactly. Well, that was the thing. I've always been a rules guy. I've actually written rulebooks for later CCGs I worked on, so that's always been my thing. Getting into the minutiae of it. Well, you know, I'm a pedant that way: "This is not how you play the game, you idiot." I tried to be a little nicer than that in customer service, which I'd never done before. They plopped me down, gave me the emails, let me answer them. Okay, sure, I'll be nice. I got a little testy occasionally, but it was like, this is right there on page eight of the rulebook; can't you freaking read or something?
[06:23] Interviewer: Yeah, I guess that is part of it too: some of it is complicated, but also, how many people just wanted to be spoon-fed?
[06:30] Jason Winter: Like you said, you want to sit down and 15 minutes later you're playing, and Star Trek, and even to some extent Star Wars, weren't like that. I feel like WARS was a simpler game at first, at least until you got into the companion with the 100-page rulebook or whatever. Star Trek definitely had its complexities and had a lot of things that were just not intuitive, but they learned a little bit from that, at least, and applied it to Star Wars to make it a little better, at least in the beginning—until you add the expansions that have new rules every time, and they all just go on top of each other.
[06:59] Interviewer: Yeah, I did want to ask about that too, because I was really only aware of the Star Trek game from researching the video that I made on the Star Wars game, and it seemed like they were a very similar rule set. But you just kind of cleared it up: they learned a lot of what not to do with Star Trek, so when they went into Star Wars, they could streamline it a little bit.
[07:17] Jason Winter: And then they did even better when they got to Lord of the Rings, which was again not as simple as Young Jedi, but also not as complex as Star Wars and Trek were.
[07:25] Interviewer: Okay. That sounds like it's probably the sweet spot they finally had.
[07:28] Jason Winter: Yeah, I think it was a really sweet spot. I think if I had to pick, I'd say Lord of the Rings was probably their best CCG of all the ones they made.
[07:36] Interviewer: So after you started—you kind of started unofficially teaching people the game, then you were officially answering the questions—what was your next role? What was your next involvement with the game?
[07:45] Jason Winter: So, everyone did a little of everything back then. If I remember correctly, they hired three of us on the same day. I think we were the 25th, 26th and 27th employees of Decipher, something like that. Tiny company. By the time I left two years later, we were up around 80. So in the early days it was a lot more [of everything]. I did all the questions and so forth, handled the frequently asked questions list, all the rules stuff, but we also contributed to design work as well. In fact—this is going to be recorded for the podcast—I'm wearing my SWCCG Product Development Team shirt here that I still have. I've got a lot of my other shirts, but I wore this one special for today.
[08:29] Jason Winter: I can remember one day—because when I came in, they had just released the first set for Star Wars, the Premiere set, and they were working on A New Hope, which was the first expansion. I came on in February, so it was probably in April or something. We were working on A New Hope and had a day where we all stayed in the office until like midnight, hashing out card ideas and doing some design and playtesting and so forth, which I thought was cool back then. I think it's probably horrible now to stay that late at work, but I was still young; I was still into it and all that. So yeah, it was great. It was a lot of fun.
[08:59] Jason Winter: But in addition to that, we did playtests. Sometimes we'd have the big playtest where we flew in people from all around the country. That's where some of the people that later worked for the company [came from]. In fact, almost everyone—like I said, we went from 27 to 80—the vast majority of those people were kind of like me. They were initially playtesters, they ran tournaments or whatever, and then they got into the playtesting and came on as employees a little later. So that was a big deal there. I also ran tournaments all around the country, especially for Star Trek. We were just developing our Star Trek tournament system at the time, organized play, so I worked on that a lot. I did occasional Star Wars tournaments too, when we had the regionals or whatever, especially if they were at the same event. I might sometimes do a Star Trek tournament on Saturday and Star Wars on Sunday in the same city. I traveled around a lot too. Unfortunately I was not smart enough to take frequent-flyer miles back then; that would have been great. [Laughter]
[10:00] Interviewer: You were just happy to be going. I like the kind of vibe of a small team of people who love Star Wars and love these complicated card games. In my mind it was a much more formal process: we have to hit these quotes, we need to hit these items, we need to hit these characters. I'm sure there were some no-brainers, like you're going to make a Han Solo card, but as a fan I always loved the different quotes that made it in, or the Death Star security camera—any little obscure thing that you guys could get a screen grab of became a card.
[10:32] Jason Winter: Yeah, our team was amazing at being able to find and really enhance a lot of stuff, because remember, these were movies from the 1970s and early '80s, and they were not in great condition even back then. We had a really great art team, guys like Dan Burns and Joe Boulden—those were a lot of the main artists on that—Rob Burns. They were really good at picking out a lot of things.
[10:55] Jason Winter: In fact, there's one card—so, one thing we did also: when A New Hope came out, we had a press tour. We brought a bunch of press in and took them out, I think on Tom Braunlich's boat, in the harbor in Virginia, and we also brought in David Prowse. He came. I remember we brought him back to the office the next day and showed him how we made one of the Vader cards, a Vader card from the two-player set. It was a shot of him standing over a chair, or maybe over a console, I don't remember exactly, and it's taken from like six different things. The artist was showing how he pulls the helmet from this and the gloves from that and the body from that and puts it all together, and it looked like a real card, like it had been David Prowse in the suit there at some point.
[11:41] Interviewer: I have to assume, for stuff like that that you couldn't line up exactly, it was like a deleted scene or unused footage or something that you guys had special access to that the fans would just never see.
[11:50] Jason Winter: I keep trying to remember, because I don't think it was for us. So, I told you about that Star Trek VCR game. Well, our marketing director, Carol Wisely, had worked, I think, for a different company—I think for Hasbro—and they did a Star Wars VCR game a few years before.
[12:03] Interviewer: I had that.
[12:05] Jason Winter: Oh, really? Okay. I almost want to say that we got some footage from that to put in there, but I could be wrong, because that was actually David Prowse in the suit.
[12:14] Interviewer: That's really cool, because it's just anything, especially when it was just the three movies—even a different angle of the same character. Like you said, standing behind a chair or a console: if it wasn't in the movie, it's like, holy crap, look at this, it's new.
[12:27] Jason Winter: Yeah. I mean, we pulled so much from those, because there were like, what, I think 300 cards in the base set, and then another 150, so basically about four to 500 cards per set back then. But in terms of—I think you talked about having deadlines or whatever. Yeah, release schedules were interesting early on. Interesting, and a little sparse.
[12:55] Interviewer: Yeah, from what I read, it sounded like it was part of the plan the whole time, and it had a really generous plan going forward for how to release it without oversaturating your market or making your design team insane. And then it just went faster and faster and faster.
[13:11] Jason Winter: Well, what you eventually realize—you look at Magic or most other games, they were releasing a new set even back then every four months or so. And of course I came on for Star Trek. The Premiere set came out in late '94; the first expansion came out in late '95. When I got there, they were barely even started on the next expansion, because Star Wars had kind of taken over. That's when you talk about having a small company: the problem is there's only so many people and so many hours to do all that stuff. And when Star Wars came on like gangbusters the way it did—and we could talk about the Scrye sales thing you mentioned a little later on—obviously a lot of the attention was directed toward that, and A New Hope. I don't remember when that launched exactly, but it also took a while. And I can remember: the motto of Decipher was "The Art of Great Games", and some fans called it "the art of late games".
[14:04] Interviewer: As a consumer, I was probably on that side. And now that I'm older and have been in the workforce and made things, and now talking to you, it's like: we might have felt it was late as the consumer, but the people making it were like, we're trying our best with 14-hour days here.
[14:18] Jason Winter: Admittedly, I feel like there was a little bit of—like you asked about, and I mentioned this too—how Warren would sit in on design meetings, and I feel like sometimes he might have been a little too nitpicky about this thing or that thing. So I think that added to it a little bit. But yeah, it could definitely take a while.
[14:37] Interviewer: Yeah, it's understandable, especially when each expansion pack came with add-on rules. The game still had to function.
[14:45] Jason Winter: Yeah, you had to do all that stuff and figure out how to incorporate all the new stuff, and blowing up the Death Star and so forth. I can remember, during the New Hope playtest, everyone trying to build either their blow-up-the-Death-Star deck or their Death-Star-blows-up-a-planet deck.
[14:59] Interviewer: Right. [Laughter] That was before the—I'm blanking on the name—the red cards?
[15:05] Jason Winter: Oh, yeah. Objectives or something?
[15:07] Interviewer: Objectives, yeah.
[15:09] Jason Winter: That was actually after my time. I wasn't even playing the game by then.
[15:13] Interviewer: I barely petered out around then. I think I bought one box, and I played with my friends. I never traveled for it or anything. I just played at the local mall, because I was riding my bike there to play.
[15:26] Jason Winter: Yeah. That was kind of the long-term problem: it just kind of collapsed under its own weight, with all the different rules and, like you said, the 100-page compendium book, which I even heard some of the guys talk about: God, why do we have a book this huge?
[15:37] Interviewer: Right. But at what point—you can't just make it a new game then, because then you're going to lose all the people that are currently playing.
[15:42] Jason Winter: Well, you do: you make Young Jedi. Or you lose the license and then Wizards of the Coast makes their own. So there you go.
[15:50] Interviewer: As far as creating the new cards—I don't know if you remember this much—was there a thing where you're like, okay, in Premiere this one card always kind of runs away, or if you have this specific combination it kind of dominates everything, we need to make a counter for it?
[16:04] Jason Winter: Yeah, there's always stuff like that in any CCG. One of the more controversial things we did: if you remember, back then the main characters—your Lukes, Vaders, whatever—were obviously very powerful, but they also had the small destiny number, which is like the die roll, the number in the corner, always like a one or something. Generally the rule was: the more useful the card, the lower its destiny number. So it was kind of supposed to be a bit of a counterbalance. Let's just say we weren't really great at designing counterbalance in games. Everyone packed their deck with Lukes and Vaders and whatever.
[16:33] Jason Winter: So one of the things we did—I think maybe around the Cloud City expansion, maybe Dagobah, I don't remember—we did a card where, if I remember correctly, you flip over your top three cards, each player does, and looks at their destiny numbers, and the one with the lower total loses that much Force, or something like that. So I flip over Luke, Obi-Wan and Han; they're all ones. You flip over Stormtrooper number six three times, and he's got like a five or whatever. So you win 15 to three, and I lose 12 Force. Which is a sort of counter, but people didn't like that.
[17:07] Interviewer: Too strong?
[17:09] Jason Winter: No—you're making the main characters weak, in a way.
[17:13] Interviewer: Yeah, that's true. You pull the hero trinity and you lose massively to a mouse droid. [Laughter]
[17:18] Jason Winter: So that was a part of it. But another thing we had was, Sense and Alter were kind of our counterspells in that game. Sense countered an Interrupt; Alter countered an Effect; but they also countered each other. So that was another thing you'd have in decks; you had people playing like 20 of each or something like that. So we made a card that you could play as an Effect, and it was immune to Alter, so it couldn't be destroyed with that, and every time they played one of those, you could make them lose Force—I don't remember exactly what it was, but it was a specific Sense/Alter counteracting card. So we did try to do balance like that, because Decipher didn't want to do the Magic [approach]. They didn't want to ban cards; they didn't want to have deck limits. That was the more elegant way they wanted to do things. Warren was definitely a very artistic kind of guy and liked to have that kind of elegance in his games, and to separate them from how Magic worked. So that was the way they chose to go instead.
[18:15] Interviewer: A deck limit being, like, you can only have four of a card?
[18:18] Jason Winter: Right. The only limit we had is it still had to be 60 cards, because your deck was still your life force.
[18:24] Interviewer: Well, yeah, of course. You can't have one guy with a 300-card deck and one guy with 50.
[18:29] Jason Winter: Which reminds me—again, a bit of a tangent here—the deck sleeves, the plastic ones or the hard ones you put them in: one guy used to put his decks entirely in the hard sleeves, so his deck was like this tall. [Laughter]
[18:47] Interviewer: I remember the tournaments I played in, we could only use the soft plastic, and they had to be clear on both sides, because a lot of people were printing cards.
[18:53] Jason Winter: Oh, yeah.
[18:55] Interviewer: Trying to fake it. I remember that became a big thing in my very local area. Sorry, the animals are all over me. It's interesting hearing about the process of trying to balance the game, because, looking back—years later, of course—I remember it being difficult to play, but I don't ever remember there being what would be called the meta now, where, oh, if this guy puts 30 of this one card in the deck, there's nothing you could do; counter for absolutely everything, and then he just uses his remaining pile. But it sounds like that very much was the case, and I'm sure whatever balance you made to counter the first thing, in the next expansion you'd have to counter the one that you created. It's like introducing an invasive species every time.
[19:41] Jason Winter: Yeah. Well, one comment that Bill Martinson came up with—I think after Tom and Rollie kind of faded into the background, Bill was more the lead designer—his motto was "the threat is worse than the execution." So you could play a deck with 20 Senses and 20 Alters, but if you know that card is out there, that one card that's going to completely screw it over, you don't want to play with that, because your opponent might have it, and if they do, you basically lose. So even if the counters just existed—and we'd devote two or three cards per set to that sort of thing—it helps to balance that out, and people will be less likely to want to play those kinds of degenerate strategies.
[20:20] Interviewer: Okay, I see what you're saying. That makes sense. Just knowing that the strategy is a possibility, people would build in their own defenses to it preemptively.
[20:28] Jason Winter: Hopefully. Sometimes the cards were so powerful they didn't care: I'll take my chances. But that was a bit of a strategy we employed. "The threat is worse than the execution"—that's all I remember.
[20:44] Interviewer: I also like—maybe like your example of getting three heroes and then three generic background Stormtroopers, and the Stormtroopers win. Obviously that's not a great scenario for fans of the franchise, but I do like the attempts to say, okay, if Vader is this powerful, let's make something about him so you don't have 10 Vaders in your deck. I do like that effort.
[21:02] Jason Winter: Yeah. Well, the way we didn't have 10 Vaders in your deck was because they were so expensive, because they were also the rare ones as well—which is something we can blame Jerry Darcy for. Apparently he used to say that it was not his decision, full on, because he wasn't high-ranking or whatever, but I think Warren or someone said, "Hey, how should we do this? Should we make the Vader ultra rare?" And Jerry was like, "Sure." So that's how he described that it went. [Laughter] He agreed to it and they went with it. So, his fault.
[21:25] Interviewer: This might be jumping the gun, because I'm not sure what expansion it was in, but at one point I remember reading about kind of reprints but also kind of new cards, so instead of the card being Darth Vader, it was Vader, and then it became a lot more common.
[21:38] Jason Winter: Yeah, so that was the Vader in the two-player set. We made a two-player set pretty early on, which was meant to be a cheap entry point. I think it was like $20. It had a Vader and a Luke. That was before we had things like "Darth Vader, Lord of the Sith" or "Luke Skywalker, Apprentice Jedi"—back before that idea really existed in CCGs in general. Now it's pretty much everywhere. But yeah, they had the Vader and the Luke, which were honestly really terrible. They were really weak. Later on, again, I'd say Lord of the Rings figured that out: you would have an Aragorn card that was in the base starter deck, and then another Aragorn that's a rare and does things a little differently. The one Aragorn in the base set might be plus one to fighting, and the other one might have better leadership skills, however that works in Lord of the Rings. So they're kind of equivalent, but they give you different strategies. You can always get that Aragorn in a starter deck, but if you want the cool strategy, you find the rare Aragorn. We didn't really have that thought of back in those days. The Luke and Vader you got in the two-player sets were just bad. They were straight up not good cards. But if, like you said, a 13-year-old wanted Luke or Vader in his deck, he could buy that.
[22:54] Interviewer: Oh, I'm sure I would open my binder and look at my Luke card just because it was Luke. It didn't even matter if it was good or not. It probably didn't even cross my mind. I probably put it in my deck because it was Luke.
[23:03] Jason Winter: Yeah. Well, later on, when I did Pokémon deck construction tips for Scrye, same thing. I'd get stuff from kids who were like 10 years old who just wanted to put every card in their deck, and I'm like, guys, if you want to have a chance of winning, you've got to be a little more competitive. [Laughter]
[23:19] Interviewer: That is a tough lesson for the younger kids. The ones who excel probably pick it up quicker. It's also interesting now, talking about it on a wider timeline with Magic, Star Trek, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings: if Decipher said, okay, it's 2026, we got the license back, and they wanted to do a revamp of the game, it would probably be so different, because they've learned so many lessons along the way.
[23:43] Jason Winter: Yeah, it would be a lot more like Lord of the Rings, or even something simpler, more Pokémon or Magic, that kind of thing. Of course, they did actually—I don't know how much you looked into the WARS CCG at all?
[23:59] Interviewer: No—you commented that on the video as well. The Star Wars one was really the only one I played. I think I had a handful of the cards just because it was Star Wars, and I didn't know how to play the game, and then a couple of friends were like, oh, at the mall they teach you how to play this, and we can go and do that on Saturday mornings. So we did that, and that led to Young Jedi, and then I kind of aged out or lost interest, and that was the end of these kinds of card games for me.
[24:21] Jason Winter: WARS—I don't remember what they called it, WARS TCG—was basically the same kind of similar-ish rules system, but with their own IP, so it couldn't be taken away. They own the rights to the rules of the game, but not the characters and so forth, so they made their own game. That was in 2004. I don't know how long it lasted. It got like one expansion, maybe.
[24:42] Interviewer: Yeah, I read a little bit on that, and it seemed to me from what I read that it kind of didn't do a whole lot, without the recognizable name. That's tough.
[24:53] Jason Winter: Yeah. But that was kind of their attempt to keep that—because, like, you have the Players Committee now, the people who still play this game and still love the original Star Wars CCG. That was kind of their attempt at the time to get the people who still loved those rules, they hoped, into a new game. But it didn't work out so well.
[25:10] Interviewer: It's tough when you have a name like Star Wars, and then you don't have a name like Star Wars.
[25:15] Jason Winter: Well, then you hopefully have Lord of the Rings—until they didn't have that. So, you know.
[25:19] Interviewer: It's interesting, the IP game. How many expansions did you stay around for?
[25:23] Jason Winter: So I was there from February '96 till January of '98. So that gave us—like I said, A New Hope was, I think, spring of '96—and then we did all the Empire Strikes Back expansions. I don't know if I was around for any of the Return of the Jedi expansions, because we did like two or three in '97, and then I think around then was when I petered out. But I still lived in Virginia. I still stuck around there. I still hung out with the guys every Friday night over at Chuck Kallenbach's house [unclear]. We'd all go and play board games or card games or video games or whatever. So we played a lot of different stuff, hung out with those guys. I still did playtesting pretty much until I left the area, around 2002. I did some playtesting on that and on Young Jedi, but not really Lord of the Rings—that was sort of the end of my time there—and Star Trek for a little while. So I was still involved with a lot of those guys and hung out with them. I had a couple of D&D campaigns and stuff with a few of them, and a Star Wars RPG game, which actually got me a card in Young Jedi named after my RPG character.
[26:33] Interviewer: Oh, very cool. Which one is it?
[26:35] Jason Winter: It's called [unclear]. He's a Bith musician. My character in our RPG was a noble and a musician, so that's why they used that.
[26:47] Interviewer: That's cool. I'll have to check my stack and see if I have it.
[26:49] Jason Winter: A lot of course had the anagram names. Are you familiar with those?
[26:51] Interviewer: No.
[26:54] Jason Winter: A lot of staff members and employees got their names anagrammed, because when you have Stormtrooper number six, he's probably got to have a name. So a lot of us got our names anagrammed into characters, and those became essentially canon. I could look up my guy on Wookieepedia: Chief Retwin. My last name is Winter, so Retwin is the anagram of that. In The Empire Strikes Back, after the Millennium Falcon goes to hyperspace, Vader kind of hangs his head and walks off the bridge of the Star Destroyer. Retwin is standing next to the door, kind of looks up at him and then looks back. So I know exactly where that guy is. A lot of us had anagram names throughout. I know I've seen a page that lists all of them, so you can look those up somewhere as well. That's a neat little thing.
[27:36] Interviewer: That is cool, and that's awesome for the people making the game, that you get to be a little part of Star Wars. Your fans are making this thing celebrating it, and now you kind of get to retroactively be put into it.
[27:47] Jason Winter: There were two teleport cards in the base set, that let you move characters around on the map: Nabrun Leids and Elis Helrot. Well, Elis Helrot is Rollie Tesh's anagram, and Nabrun Leids is Daniel Burns, one of our artists. So those are some of the earliest ones we had there.
[28:06] Interviewer: That's cool. I like that, because I've been doing a lot of lore videos on Cantina aliens or aliens in Jabba's Palace, and there's that similar kind of thing from people working at ILM in the day. So it's cool that the tradition continued. Sorry—you've got your co-stars. As soon as the camera comes on, they come running. It's really cool that you got to stick it out, and even after you moved on professionally you were hanging out with them and still playtesting, so you stayed part of it. And I like that working there didn't hurt your love for those kinds of games.
[28:43] Jason Winter: Yeah, exactly. A few months later I started working part-time for Scrye, still from my apartment in Virginia, and then came on more full-time about a year after I left Decipher. So I did the playtesting, and it was also good marketing for them. I went to their DecipherCons, which were little events they had in Virginia Beach. So I could hang out for all of that and cover them both as a fan and as a playtester, and then also as media.
[29:12] Interviewer: Nice. If you don't mind me asking, what did you go to college for?
[29:16] Jason Winter: Computer science. Which I've basically never used.
[29:19] Interviewer: You just kind of made a career out of celebrating the games you like.
[29:23] Jason Winter: Yeah. Pretty much. Like I said, I worked for Scrye, worked for Beckett's magazines as well, and then a couple of other collectible card game companies, and also for a couple of media websites. Mostly I've been writing my whole career, as opposed to any sort of programming.
[29:39] Interviewer: That's interesting. I was just curious, because I didn't know—what would you go to school for to then work on the Star Wars Customizable Card Game?
[29:46] Jason Winter: Nothing, really. I don't know what degrees anyone else had or what education they had. But again, like we talked about before, you become a fan and you get there through that, in those days especially. Nowadays, especially in computer games, you've got to have the technical skills, maybe not as much if you're in marketing or a softer discipline. But yeah, it's the sort of thing where you fake it till you make it, I guess.
[30:14] Interviewer: I guess the ability to execute the work should be more important than having the piece of paper saying you went through enough school to do the work.
[30:23] Jason Winter: In theory. Try for a job these days. [Laughter] That's a whole other rabbit hole.
[30:28] Interviewer: Exactly. I feel like I should have a bunch more questions, but it's really insightful to get inside the office of Decipher.
[30:35] Jason Winter: I was going to say: you did mention the Scrye sales list in your video.
[30:39] Interviewer: Yes. You wanted to get to that, please.
[30:41] Jason Winter: So, from what I can recall, I think around the time Star Wars released—so a couple of months later, because there's lead time for this sort of thing—there was one issue of Scrye where it said Star Wars outsold Magic. Now, years later, working at Scrye and handling those numbers—I was actually in charge of figuring out those numbers—there were small sample sizes. Let's just put it that way. And I've also heard from other people that, if you're a store that sells a good bit of Star Wars or whatever, maybe the company comes to you and says, "Hey, could you notch the numbers up a little bit so that they look good in the magazines?" I don't know that personally; I just heard that that could be a thing. Now, for its launch month, could the Star Wars CCG have been bigger than Magic? I think it's possible, but it would have only been very temporary. It would have gone right back down right after. I mean, Magic was well established by then.
[31:36] Interviewer: Yeah, exactly. That makes sense.
[31:38] Jason Winter: Some video game might surpass World of Warcraft for a month, but then [WoW is] right on top right after.
[31:44] Interviewer: It's funny, because the articles always celebrate it like the tide is changing, and it's like, slow down. Let's see what it's like in a month, two months, six months.
[31:54] Jason Winter: "Biggest game of December 1996"—or 2025. [Laughter] You can prove any stat on a narrow enough focus.
[32:05] Interviewer: Exactly. I wish in my video I could have said that Star Wars dominated Magic for three years or whatever, but I figured that would not be the case.
[32:12] Jason Winter: Sure. I should say too: at one point we even had a product development house, which was a house about three or four blocks from the office that Warren bought, because Star Wars made a lot of money. Star Trek made a good amount of money; I'm under the impression Star Wars made a lot more. So Decipher was pretty flush with cash. Again, we went from 27 to 80 employees in a few years, did a lot of conventions, a lot of other stuff. And Warren bought a house which was just the product development house. That was where they did all the design work. It was like a three-story townhouse in Virginia Beach—or in Norfolk, rather. We'd go there, and they had projectors set up so they could show the cards that were in development, and so on and so forth. That was an interesting thing to have. We'd go over there for lunch sometimes and play random games in one of the rooms. I remember we had a Formula Dé tournament going on at one point. We made a circuit, like the actual IndyCar circuits or F1, [Laughter] and we'd keep scores every week of who came out on top.
[33:12] Interviewer: That's cool. Not to bring the mood down, but when Star Wars is going that good, and the company's buying things like houses, and big conventions, all the money going out—was it always looming over your head that at any time Lucasfilm could be like, we're done?
[33:35] Jason Winter: I don't know. I mean, as long as we're making the money, they're getting their 15% cut or whatever, they're happy with it. So that's probably a large part of it. And a big issue Decipher had was around 2001, I think: their chief financial officer, I don't remember exactly what his title was, was embezzling money the whole time, and eventually he got nailed for that. I remember, when I wrote a little bit for ICv2 in the late 2000s, like 2008–09, that came to trial and he got sentenced. But that had a pretty big effect, I understand, on Decipher's financial situation in the early 2000s, which might have led in part to them losing the license and not being able to support it at that point. I don't know exactly all the particulars there, but there were definitely the good times and there were the lean times. Fortunately, I was there during the good times.
[34:23] Interviewer: Yeah, sounds like it. I've only heard secondhand what all the bad times were. I try not to focus too much on the negative with stuff like this, especially since for me it's a big nostalgia thing. I'd rather just remember the game being awesome. But it just sucks to hear: the small company, they're making something people love, they're having a good time doing it, it seems like a win across the board, and this one guy's got to go and screw it up for everybody.
[34:47] Jason Winter: I mean, I don't think it was entirely him. I think it's a lot of what you talked about, where the game got really complex and really convoluted. And around that time was when Pokémon took off. Pokémon was like 2000, so that took all the kids away—and a lot of the adults, honestly. [CCGs] surged in '95, and there were a lot in '96, and then very little in '97, practically nothing in '98 and '99. Then Pokémon comes out in 2000, and there's this big resurgence. It's like '95 all over again. So not only Pokémon, but a lot of other games came out around that time as well. That would also probably have drawn in a lot of the Star Wars fans, CCG fans.
[35:30] Interviewer: That makes sense. I didn't mean to put it all on the one guy, but company-wise, embezzling money always hurts. And I guess that's just kind of a trend in pop culture and gaming. You mentioned World of Warcraft earlier: when World of Warcraft was coming out, its first few years, you couldn't look at an IP that didn't have an MMO coming out. Now I'm sure there are some still running, but World of Warcraft is the one.
[35:52] Jason Winter: I've played a lot of Lord of the Rings Online, so yeah, I know exactly how that is.
[35:57] Interviewer: I tried the Star Wars ones, but they didn't quite stick.
[36:00] Jason Winter: Yeah, I've played a little of everything. Everything popular, I've tried at least a little bit of, probably in that same time frame. I went to the Scrye CCG book and counted like 110 games in it that I had tried, of which about 20 were serious play, where I actually bought cards, made decks and so forth. But I tried almost everything in that time frame.
[36:22] Interviewer: And is that just your natural curiosity, or was it kind of your job also?
[36:25] Jason Winter: A little of both, actually, being, again, at Scrye afterwards, having to try a lot of everything. But the 20 or so were stuff that I actually liked.
[36:32] Interviewer: Which even back then, you think of that as being a lot, because people have their game and then maybe get into one or two others. Just the habit of buying booster packs and trying to build your deck and trying to maintain it—and in the Star Wars game, you needed two. I don't know if the other games were like that as well.
[36:51] Jason Winter: Not so much. Very, very few games. Netrunner was an early one like that, where you'd be the runner, the hacker, or the corp. That was one of the few that was like that, but mostly they were all just single-deck games—which is probably a thing that has not really been repeated since the mid-'90s, probably for that reason, because you have to maintain the two different decks.
[37:11] Interviewer: It's interesting, because at the time, with that being my only experience, it made total sense to me. There's the light side and the dark side, the good guys and the bad guys; of course you need both. But thinking back on it—especially then, I was delivering newspapers on my bike, making like no money, buying a booster pack and hoping you get a card you can use.
[37:29] Jason Winter: And that was when booster packs were like $2.50 or $3. Now they're what, like $5 or something like that? We don't know anymore. [Laughter]
[37:37] Interviewer: It's funny. When I was making the video, I went through my collection that had just been in a box for decades, and I had bought an entire box of boosters of Death Star II. As soon as I found that flimsy cardboard box, I was like, I probably saved up for three months to buy this. Opened them all within 15 minutes.
[37:57] Jason Winter: I know. Speaking of which, now that I think about it, I still have a lot of my boxes. I threw away a lot of the common cards; I still have a lot of the rare cards that I kept around. But also something else I kept: pretty cool artifacts from those playtests in '96 and '97. I kept some of those playtest cards. What we did is we would print them just on paper, and then we'd cut them out and glue them to cards, or glue them to a Dark Side card back, and that's the new Vader or whatever. And I have a lot of those, with either incomplete text or pictures or whatever. I should probably have gotten those out and shown them off, but I can send you pictures later if you want to slap them in.
[38:34] Interviewer: Yeah, I can overlay them. That'd be really cool. Are these ones that never made it to production, or were tweaked, or a little bit of everything?
[38:45] Jason Winter: Most of the ones I have are more or less complete. You might change a number or two, or change a little bit of text, just tweak it with the play. Some are very different. Star Wars cards had the rules text below and then the lore up above; very few of them have the lore. It might just say "Han Solo was a smuggler", that's it, something like that. Basic little placeholder text.
[39:07] Interviewer: That reminds me of something I did want to ask. How did the lore come about? Did you have to go to Lucasfilm for every bit of it?
[39:16] Jason Winter: So, Jerry Darcy did a lot of that. He was the big Star Wars fan. Actually—I mentioned earlier Bill [as lead designer]; I did that wrong earlier. Bill was more of the Star Trek guy. Jerry was the Star Wars fan. He wrote a lot of the lore. And depending on what it was, yeah, we did have to go to Lucasfilm for that, although I'm trying to remember how it went, because West End Games—they were the ones who did the Star Wars RPG—we'd often get one of their guys. I don't remember what their official capacity was, but they were obviously really deep into the lore. I don't know what their relationship was, if they were a branch of Lucas or something like that, but we'd get one of their guys to come down—George was one, and Paul was the other, I remember their names—and they would actually be there during our playtest weekends, and they would proof the lore. They would be sort of the proofreaders for the lore, which then went on to the people at Lucas. I don't remember exactly what the approval process was on that, but I do remember having George and Paul—who were not the Beatles, just so you know—there to oversee the lore of it.
[40:17] Interviewer: That's really interesting, because so much lore came out of those games, the West End Games books especially. Every single video I research, the West End Games books come up. And my understanding was Lucasfilm was kind of like, as long as you don't change the movies, you're good to go. Obviously they had to approve it; they couldn't just say wild stuff.
[40:41] Jason Winter: Yeah, they were very flexible with all that sort of thing. Like, again, you mentioned naming all the characters after our anagrams: they didn't care about random Stormtrooper number six or whatever. They didn't mind if you wanted to throw a name on him. I know authors did that too sometimes, in various video games or whatever else was out there. That happened a fair bit back then. They're probably a little more strict about it now, if I had to guess.
[41:06] Interviewer: Just being part of a larger—
[41:08] Jason Winter: Being part of the Disney company. I didn't want to say the name. [Laughter]
[41:11] Interviewer: Well, bleep it out if it's going to get you a copyright strike or whatever. I think it's okay. We're not saying anything bad about them.
[41:17] Jason Winter: As long as we don't sing "Let It Go", I think we're fine.
[41:24] Interviewer: I've really got to get someone on from those earlier days who worked at Lucasfilm, because I want to know what the connection was with West End Games, with Decipher, with the novels—how much of this had oversight. It's strange, because some of the lore on the cards would in hindsight now be considered wrong. The one that comes to mind is Owen Lars being Obi-Wan's brother, but at the time it was probably true. So things like that are really interesting to me.
[41:52] Jason Winter: Right. He's actually Darth Vader's brother.
[41:56] Interviewer: There you go. They were close.
[41:58] Jason Winter: Yeah. A lot of records were lost when the Republic fell, so things got a little confused. Speaking of which, that's another thing, too: when we were at conventions, occasionally we'd have some of the celebrities, like I mentioned David Prowse. I think we did actually have Phil Brown—I think that was his name—who was Owen Lars. That was after my time, though. I have an Owen Lars signed by him.
[42:21] Interviewer: Oh, that's cool. And you have a Vader signed by David Prowse?
[42:25] Jason Winter: Yeah, I think I do. I do, actually. It's actually in a frame, like a little plaque.
[42:33] Interviewer: I was going to say—because you're like, "I think I do"—I'm like, is that in a box in the back of your closet? I would have that thing on the wall in UV-filtered Plexi.
[42:41] Jason Winter: Which is actually kind of a funny thing that they mentioned too: in '95, at one of the Gen Cons where they were showing off Star Wars for the first time, they couldn't afford any of the big names there, but across the aisle from them was Wing Commander, which Mark Hamill appeared in, and he was at that booth. So there was a lot of residual traffic of people coming over to try the Star Wars game.
[43:08] Interviewer: Oh, that's lucky. You got Mark Hamill without having to pay for Mark Hamill.
[43:13] Jason Winter: Exactly. [Laughter]
[43:15] Interviewer: That's really cool. So you got in as a fan, as we covered, and then you had cool opportunities to meet these people and get some signed memorabilia. I'm guessing you're also a huge Star Wars fan.
[43:28] Jason Winter: Actually, not. [Laughter] That's the funny thing: I was brought on for the Star Trek. I was much more into Star Trek. I can actually remember, when Decipher got the Star Wars license, I was like, well, I'd better learn Star Wars. I had seen Return of the Jedi in theaters when I was like nine years old, and all I remembered was Vader taking his mask off—that was the only memory I had, seeing this wrinkled old dude: that's Darth Vader, really? [Laughter] But I barely knew the movies. I couldn't recall many details. One of the cable networks had a weekend where they showed all three of them back to back to back, and I just watched them all: okay, now I've got to know this stuff. That was work for me. That was a working Sunday for me.
[44:12] Interviewer: That's exactly what I was just going to ask. So your involvement with Star Wars was purely for the job.
[44:18] Jason Winter: Yeah, basically. I mostly did the Star Trek stuff. I learned it, and I got into it, and nowadays I'm still into it more. I've watched The Mandalorian and Rogue One and all the other stuff, and the various cartoons a little bit too. So I'm more into it than I used to be, but back then it just wasn't that interesting to me.
[44:34] Interviewer: That's interesting. So what made you want to do the work for Star Wars? Was it just, I like working with this company, I want to work with these people?
[44:42] Jason Winter: It was better than a real job. [Laughter] I got out of college—I graduated in the summer of '95—and was with Decipher in early '96. I had a temp job for a little while, but I was like, I don't know what I want to do. Do I really want to be a computer programmer? I've always liked games. My family's played games forever, board games, card games, whatever, and my parents played stuff with me all the time. And I still do games now; I still do video games a lot. So that's the sort of thing I'm into, and it was just natural for me to get into that rather than sitting in front of a desk typing computer code all day.
[45:17] Interviewer: And it's funny, because now, if you look back—I don't know if job security is a thing at all anymore in this world, but computer programmers are going extinct.
[45:29] Jason Winter: That's true. I should have learned AI. Should learn AI now.
[45:34] Interviewer: Oh, I know. I'm in web development and I'm trying, but it's like, oh man, I don't want to start over now. [Laughter] That's funny, though. I would have assumed you were like, oh, it was the Star Wars thing, and I loved it.
[45:46] Jason Winter: Yeah, I was there for the Star Trek, more so. [Laughter]
[45:48] Interviewer: Now that you put out the order of things, it makes a lot of sense, because the Star Trek game, from what I gather, hit pretty big.
[45:55] Jason Winter: It was a big deal. Next to Magic it was probably the next biggest game out there. There was something just before it—maybe it was Spellfire, which was based on D&D, but it was also owned by TSR, so I don't know if that really counts—but this was like the first real licensed CCG. So of course people could see Captain Picard and Worf and whatever and the Enterprise, and they were like, oh my God, I can play a card game with this. That's amazing.
[46:27] Interviewer: And Star Trek was never as merch-heavy as Star Wars, so the fans probably really loved having something that they could collect and flock to.
[46:36] Jason Winter: Well, it helped too that Star Trek was still in active production at the time. I remember at Gen Con '94 they had a TV there, and they were showing the promo for Star Trek Generations, because the series had just ended, and Generations was due in November or something. That trailer was playing on loop the whole time I was there. So I heard that trailer like 100 times.
[47:05] Interviewer: When you put it in those terms, it's kind of weird that the Star Wars game outdid the Star Trek game, because Star Wars at that time—that was the dark times for fans. There were three movies, and that was all there ever would be.
[47:15] Jason Winter: Well, I think the Special Edition was announced at least by that point, so we knew that was coming. The Special Edition movies came out in '96, '97, I think, something like that, and then of course going into that, the prequels—I don't remember when they were officially announced. And I can remember—it's weird, because the prequels didn't come out until '99, which is like a year and a half after I left—by the way, they all got tickets from Lucasfilm to go see the prequel, and I latched on to that. I got to go as well. It was a fancy theater with really nice couches, almost like a dinner theater, and we had like 30 employees there, and me as well, and some families and whatnot.
[48:04] Interviewer: So they kind of just rented the theater out and let the people go.
[48:07] Jason Winter: Basically, yeah. I forgot where I was going. [Laughter]
[48:14] Interviewer: You were trying to figure out the timeline.
[48:17] Jason Winter: Right, the timeline. So that came out in May of '99. I left in January of '98. I'm trying to remember, because in the office we got the trailer for The Phantom Menace, and I remember that was the first time I saw it, and it wasn't out yet. We weren't supposed to be showing it off, but whatever. I remember that was the first time we saw Darth Maul put out the two blades on his lightsaber. We just geeked the hell out over that: oh my God, what is that? That was a huge moment. I remember seeing that on a computer in the Decipher office.
[48:47] Interviewer: I guess you weren't with the company anymore, but just from talking to your buddies, do you know if there were any conversations—because I know some prequel cards came out for SWCCG, not Young Jedi—how were they planning on gelling those things, with, like, here's Anakin, but you also have a Darth Vader card?
[49:12] Jason Winter: I don't know. I don't know what the rules were on that. You'd have to look in one of the rule sheets. That was definitely after my time.
[49:22] Interviewer: I had to try.
[49:25] Jason Winter: Nice try, though. We'll talk afterwards about other people you might be able to contact.
[49:31] Interviewer: Oh, very cool, that'd be great. So what are you currently into? I don't want you to say anything you can't say, like a secret project—
[49:37] Jason Winter: No, no, I have no NDA signed. I'm an open book at this point, I guess. I think the last time I played a card game was probably about 2005. Actually, you know what, I can remember now: when I was with Scrye, I was in Wisconsin, about an hour and a half south of where my brother and his two sons, my nephews, lived, and I'd go up there every now and then. We'd play various games; I'd bring board games, whatever. And at one point my brother said, hey, I know you used to do this Star Wars game; do you still have any cards for it? Can we try it out a little bit? So I brought it up there, and I explained the same things: it's a little complex, there's a lot of stuff going on. We played it once, and he was like, yeah, that's a bit much. They had actually gotten into the Lord of the Rings card game a little bit, him and his sons, so they liked that decently. But going back to Star Wars—like I said, you see the advances from Star Wars to Lord of the Rings. Going backwards is a really tough road.
[50:38] Interviewer: Especially backwards after years of not playing it.
[50:40] Jason Winter: Exactly. For them to have been introduced to Lord of the Rings, and now I'm going to introduce you to Star Wars—
[50:47] Interviewer: Right, a less refined version. You have to play essentially a worse-playing game.
[50:52] Jason Winter: Yeah. It's like MMOs: trying to play a modern game and then going back to original World of Warcraft, which I know is a thing people love. World of Warcraft Classic is basically like the people who still play the Star Wars [CCG with the] Players Committee. It's not a thing for the mass market, but the small dedicated group who loved it back then still want to do it. So it's kind of the same thing.
[51:14] Interviewer: That makes a lot of sense. The Players Committee, from what I understand, at least took all the complicated rules—I don't think they simplified it to a Young Jedi level, but I think they pared it down to a manageable, streamlined game.
[51:26] Jason Winter: Yeah. Because a big deal back then, too, is you've got to have that new hook for the new set. When you want to sell cards, you've got to have the new thing: hey, you can blow up the Death Star in this one, you can have these Objectives, you can do this other cool thing. They had to put in those new rules—at least they thought they did; maybe not, who knows—but they always tried to put in that new hook to get you in. And I've often compared collectible card games to MMORPGs. They do the same thing: here, there are flying mounts in this one, or there's housing in this one. You have that big hook, and maybe they get a little too complex for their own britches sometimes, but that's just how it is.
[52:00] Interviewer: For me personally, when the Objectives came, I had a handle on the game and now it's a new thing, and it wasn't for me. But I got a lot of comments on that video from people who love the Objectives, and that brought them new interest. So I guess it's up to the individual.
[52:17] Jason Winter: Yeah, exactly. But other than that, like I said, I don't really play collectible card games anymore. I'm into video games. I stream on Twitch, twitch.tv/jasonwinter, if you want that. I've got my own YouTube channel, Fantasy Roots, so I do that sort of stuff too: history of fantasy, that sort of thing.
[52:38] Interviewer: And are you still working for a publication? I guess maybe not magazines at this point, but websites?
[52:44] Jason Winter: I do write. I work for MMOBomb, an MMO and free-to-play site that also does other multiplayer games. I still write for them occasionally. They used to do podcasts; I did a lot of those.
[52:57] Interviewer: Very cool. Sounds like you found a way to have a very fun career.
[53:01] Jason Winter: As I said, it's better than a real job.
[53:03] Interviewer: Absolutely. Well, Jason, I really appreciate you—one, just reaching out with a comment, because that was huge, paragraphs of information, and very nice about me mispronouncing Scrye—and then taking the time to come on. This was really awesome, a cool trip down memory lane, and a lot more insight. So I really appreciate it.
[53:28] Jason Winter: I'll probably think of 20 other things I could tell you after we cut the camera.
[53:32] Interviewer: You've got my Discord. We could always do it again. [Laughter]
[53:36] Jason Winter: All right. Awesome. Take care.