A Conversation With Matt Mercer

Folks likely know you from your work as dungeon master for Critical Role. Would you tell me a little bit about your early history with gaming?

I very much grew up in a board gaming family. We had family game nights fairly often as just a way to get around the table, and weʼd play everything from classic board games to a lot of silly card games. It was a bonding experience for us.

But I grew up on video games. I was raised on the Atari 2600 to the NES to Super NES, and on forever. So that was really my first foray into genre gaming. I was very much drawn toward storylines and the early RPGs like the first Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior. So, that was my introduction to that sort of genre media, as well as reading fantasy novels and stuff.

I didnʼt get the opportunity to get into tabletop games until I was in high school. I always heard about things like D&D and wanted the opportunity to engage. But it wasnʼt quite a thing that was open and available in a lot of spaces, especially post “Satanic Panic.” There was just a lot of general social misunderstanding of what it was. You kind of had to ask the right questions, or know where to look, and I didnʼt know either of those. But I more or less stumbled into a game in high school with a bunch of upperclassmen who were part of our video game/anime club. And that was my kind of first foray into the game. And I immediately was like: “Oh, oh no. This is something I can really sink my teeth into.”