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Greg Costikyan (born July 22, 1959), sometimes known under the pseudonym Designer X, is an American game designer and science fiction writer. Costikyan's career spans nearly all extant genres of gaming, including: hex-based wargaming, role-playing games, board games, card games, computer games, online games, and mobile games. Several of his games have won Origins Awards. He co-founded Manifesto Games, now out of business, with Johnny Wilson in 2005.
Costikyan and Eric Goldberg left West End Games in January 1987, forming the short-lived Goldberg Associates. When West End Games declared bankruptcy in 1998, Costikyan and Goldberg tried to recover the rights to Paranoia; although West End's founder Scott Palter tried to fight this, a judge gave the rights back to the creators in 2000. Costikyan designed the role-playing game Violence (1999) under the pseudonym "Designer X" for Hogshead Publishing, and made sure that the game would widely available by releasing it under a Creative Commons license. Costikyan and Goldberg licensed Paranoia to Mongoose Publishing, which began producing new books for the game in 2004.
Costikyan was the CEO of Manifesto Games, a start-up devoted to providing a viable path to market for independently developed computer games. He subsequently worked as a consultant for several years before joining Guerillapps as lead game designer in March 2010 to develop its game Trash Tycoon for Facebook. In May 2011, he joined Disney Playdom as senior games designer and in January 2014 assumed the same role at Loop Drop. In June 2015, Costikyan joined Boss Fight Entertainment as senior games designer.
He has written on games, game design, and game industry business issues for publications including The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Salon, The Escapist, Gamasutra, and the magazine Game Developer.
He has lectured on game design at universities including the IT University of Copenhagen, Helsinki University of Art & Design, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Stony Brook University.
In 2019, Costikyan and Goldberg joined Playable Worlds, a startup founded by Raph Koster focused on producing the massively multiplayer online role-playing game Stars Reach.
Costikyan's other RPG credits include Acute Paranoia (1986) for Paranoia, and Your Own Private Idaho (1987) for The Price of Freedom.
In addition, Costikyan is a widely published author on the subject of game design and the role of games in culture. His essay "I Have No Words and I Must Design" is widely read as a conceptual approach to framing game design.
Costikyan worked on game design for many years, including writing and consulting for Nokia. In September 2005, he left Nokia to join with Johnny Wilson, former editor of Computer Gaming World, in founding the startup indie game publisher Manifesto Games. He regularly contributed to the now defunct Manifesto Games' website, and was editor in chief of their now defunct offshoot game review blog Play This Thing.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Costikyan was a leading player of Slobbovia. His novel One Quest, Hold the Dragons includes several stories about "crottled greeps", a Slobbovian meme.
In 1997, he designed the video game .
In February 2009, Costikyan updated the rules and re-released his 1979 space combat game, Vector 3, under a Creative Commons license as a free PDF download.
His latest novel, First Contract (in French : Space O.P.A. - 2000, ), depicts (with much dry humor) the vast sociological and economic changes that happen after aliens arrive on Earth, and one entrepreneur's efforts to survive and make a new start.
In 2013, Costikyan's non-fiction look at the role of uncertainty in game development Uncertainty in Games was published by MIT Press. A paperback edition was subsequently published in 2015. .
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