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Cover Story. Franz Vohwinkel
On the other hand: Seattle. ”It is one of the most diversified cities in the USA,“ Vohwinkel says. Not only countless game companies – analogous and digital ones – are located there, but also many tech- nology corporations. His wife worked at Microsoft. And Amazon was growing right in front of their doorstep – which became a problem over time, since the enterprise also changed the structure of the city.
Bit by bit, the Internet giant bought up old industrial areas and other build- ings in order to erect office towers there. The company‘s headquarters in Seattle has about 40,000 employees, spread throughout 33 buildings, as German ”manager magazin” wrote. That was in 2017. ”Amazon has changed the skyline of Seattle over the past few years,“ Imelda says. It doesn‘t take much to imagine the political influence that the corporation has on the city. This was also one of the reasons why the Vohwinkel couple could well imagine a return to Germany. The city they moved to in 2006, their Seattle, started to change with a very lasting im- pact.
However, Franz Vohwinkel appreci- ated the open and easy-going attitude of the Americans – especially at game fairs, which always had ”Artist Alleys,“ i.e., small corridors for illustrators. ”This always had some of the flair of an arti- san market.“ He sold prints and original pictures there. ”In this respect, the Amer- icans are real fans: They love to buy the pictures, they want you to sign them. And they spend good money for them.“
This is also the reason why he creates new cards for Magic: The Gathering not directly at the digital drawing board but, quite traditionally, with a brush and oil paint – because there are always collec- tors of originals in the Magic community. After that, for the actual game, he dig- italizes the painting and edits it on the computer until it is ready for printing. „I learned the entire painting technique on my own,“ he tells me. It is a bit like back in the early 1990s, when everything was done by hand and not on the PC.
He has another work in progress sitting in his office: a prototype of a game. ”I‘ve already been tinkering with it for eight years,“ he reveals. It is a project that saw the light of day rather by happenstance. ”I didn‘t feel an impulse in me to create my own game no matter what.“ But about
A favorite project: Blue Moon; Vohwin- kel painted the pictures and took on the art direction.
ten years ago, he had painted images for puzzles, typical fantasy motifs as they are known from Vohwinkel. The three images were interconnected by a story.
”At Gen Con, I sold prints with these images, and that went very well. Peo- ple asked me whether they could read the background story somewhere. Then I even began to write the story. And at some point, I thought that I might be able to turn this into a game.“ But this isn‘t so easy. Meanwhile, he has started working on the idea in cooperation with Michael Rieneck. The two guys know each other and have cooperated several times before. And now they are neighbors, sort of. ”Michael lives less than 15 minutes away from here,“ Franz Vohwinkel says. „I finally approached him, since I‘ve real- ized that I need somebody who is good in math.“ He grins.
Imelda calls from the living room. A deer has shown up. It is casually lying in the grass and is not bothered by three human beings looking at it with rapt at- tention. And now? Enough talking, let‘s get out again, to the beach and to the boardwalk, in order to move a bit after a long conversation, and have a look around Eckernförde. Definitely not one of the most diversified towns. But quaint, original, a bit austere, with its own candy manufactory and distillery. And it turns out that the northern German Baltic coast is truly beautiful. (sbw)
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