Michael Alyn Pondsmith is a roleplaying, board, and video game designer. He is best known for his work for the publisher R. Talsorian Games, where he developed a majority of the company's role-playing game lines since the company's foundation in 1982. Pondsmith is credited as author of several RPG lines, including Mekton (1984), Cyberpunk (1988) and Castle Falkenstein (1994). He also contributed to the Forgotten Realms and Oriental Adventures lines of the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game, worked in various capacities on video games and authored or co-created several board games. Pondsmith also worked as an instructor at the DigiPen Institute of Technology. Born in a military family, Pondsmith was traveling around the world with the U.S. Air Force for the first 18 years of his life. He graduated from the University of California, Davis achieving B.A. in graphic design and B.S. in psychology. Pondsmith recalls that he's been designing games even as a child but it wasn't until college where he got introduced to the idea of pen and paper roleplaying games when a friend of his got a copy of the original Dungeons & Dragons. Having a lot of naval wargaming experience he got interested in the gameplay mechanics utilized by the D&D but not in the fantasy setting presented. His interest spiked however when he acquired a copy of Traveller, a science fiction role-playing game, published in 1977 by Game Designers' Workshop. Dissatisfied with its mechanics, Pondsmith rewrote the game for his personal use under the name Imperial Star. Pondsmith later called Traveller the best roleplaying game he's encountered in the Green Ronin's award winning Hobby Games: The 100 Best.