Michael Alyn Pondsmith is an American roleplaying, board, and video game designer. He founded the publisher R. Talsorian Games in 1982, where he developed a majority of the company's role-playing game lines.[2] Pondsmith is the 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.