| Eric Goldberg | |
| Nationality: | American |
| Occupation: | Game designer |
Eric Goldberg is an American game designer who has worked primarily on role-playing games.
Eric Goldberg designed Commando, a man-to-man game of tactical combat which also included systems for character creation and skills, published by Simulations Publications, Incorporated (SPI).[1] Goldberg also designed DragonQuest (1980), the largest role-playing game from SPI.[1] Goldberg also contributed to Thieves' World (1981) from Chaosium.[1] Goldberg had been friends with Greg Costikyan for years and also worked at SPI with him, and they talked to Dan Gelber about making a professional game out of the role-playing game design that Gelber called "Paranoia" and ran for his local game group.[1] Gelber gave Goldberg and Costikyan his notes and they developed those ideas into a full manuscript for an RPG.[1] During his time working at SPI, Goldberg also designed Eric Goldberg's KURSK which was subsequently published in 1980; this project was the 2nd Edition of SPI's original KURSK game (1971). Goldberg started working for West End Games in 1983 as its new Vice President of Research & Development.[1] Gelber, Costikyan, and Goldberg were therefore able to license their Paranoia game to West End Games, and Ken Rolston helped rewrite the rules before it was published in 1984.[1] Goldberg designed Tales of the Arabian Nights (1985) for West End, a storytelling board game based on written paragraphs.[1]
Costikyan and Goldberg left West End Games in January 1987, forming the short-lived game company Goldberg Associates.[1] West End Games declared bankruptcy in 1998, so Costikyan and Goldberg tried to recover the rights to Paranoia but West End Games founder Scott Palter resisted, and a judge gave the rights back to the creators in 2000.[1] Costikyan and Goldberg licensed Paranoia to Mongoose Publishing, which began producing new books for the game in 2004.[1] In writing the new edition called Paranoia XP, Varney, Goldberg and Costikyan reached out to and actively collaborated with Paranoias online fan community through an official blog and through Paranoia-Live.net.[2]
In 2019, Goldberg and Raph Koster founded a new company, Playable Worlds, and are currently developing an as-yet-unnamed MMORPG.