Peter Levin is not only a founder and managing director of Santa Monica-headquartered venture capital firm Griffin Gaming Partners, which is known for investments focused on the global gaming space and related fields, such as sports. He is also, among other things, co-founder and chairman of the board of former Bellator boss and Strikeforce founder Scott Coker’s new global MMA league. And he has long been a passionate collector of trading cards.
In fact, the former CEO and co-founder of genre and pop culture media company Nerdist Industries, which sold to Legendary in 2012, owns what he says are 500,000-plus trading cards.
The intersection of video games and trading cards has been a hotbed of activity and collaborations. Case in point: popular crossovers between Hasbro’s collectible trading card game Magic: The Gathering and such gaming franchises as Final Fantasy, God of War, Fallout and Tomb Raider.
Similarly, collectible cards and card games were in the spotlight at Gamescom in Cologne in August, with attendees streaming to booths handing out special cards, such as Upper Deck cards for Tencent’s Honor of Kings, amplifying brands.
Hollywood has also taken note of what is on the cards. Pokémon, the world’s top card game, recently unveiled Pokémon: Wild Card as the Pokémon World Championships in San Francisco wrapped. The main character will be a Pokémon trading-card game player who is “battling and striving to be a champion.”Or how about that big multiyear global licensing partnership between Hasbro and Upper Deck to produce trading cards and tabletop games for such iconic IPs as Transformers and G.I. Joe. The first offering: a Transformers 40th anniversary trading card set, launching exclusively at Target in mid-September.
