In the 1990s, anime was exploding across North America. Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball Z, Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and a growing shelf of imported tapes were changing what fantasy and science fiction looked like to a generation of fans. Tabletop RPGs had plenty of fantasy, plenty of superheroes, plenty of cyberpunk, and plenty of dense toolkits.

What they did not really have was a clean, flexible way to say: I want to play that.

MacKinnon’s answer was Big Eyes, Small Mouth. BESM did not try to simulate one show. It tried to make anime itself playable: magical girls, martial artists, psychic teens, mecha pilots, space adventurers, monsters, school comedy, horror, romance, and strange genre mixtures that did not fit comfortably inside older RPG categories.

That is the cleanest version of his design legacy. He gave anime fans a character sheet.

Body, Mind, And Soul

BESM’s central trick was the Tri-Stat System.

The name was literal. Instead of building characters around long stat arrays, Tri-Stat reduced the core to Body, Mind, and Soul. Physical presence, mental capacity, and inner force. From those three measures, the game could build heroes, aliens, schoolchildren, gods, robots, magical fighters, and whatever else the table wanted to throw into the same episode.

The result was rules-light, but not empty. Characters were built through broad abilities and drawbacks that could be reskinned to match the fiction. A blast might be a ki attack, a magic wand, a psychic wave, or a shoulder-mounted cannon. The numbers could stay stable while the story changed costumes.

That mattered because anime is not a genre in the ordinary Western RPG sense. It is a medium and a style reservoir. It contains sports drama, giant robots, slice-of-life comedy, cosmic melodrama, monster battles, and tragic romance. A game trying to serve that audience could not be too narrow.

MacKinnon understood that. BESM was not asking players to stay in one lane. It was asking what the lane even meant once a catgirl hacker, a martial artist prince, a haunted schoolgirl, and a transforming robot all belonged at the same table.

Guardians Of Order

MacKinnon founded Guardians of Order in Guelph, Ontario, and released BESM in 1997. The company’s early years were fast, ambitious, and unusually tuned to anime fandom.

The breakthrough was not only mechanical. It was commercial and cultural. Guardians of Order recognized that anime fans wanted more than a generic RPG with a Japanese coat of paint. They wanted books that treated the source material seriously.

The Sailor Moon Role-Playing Game and Resource Book showed the move. It was both a playable RPG adaptation and a fan reference. Guardians of Order followed with licenses and fan guides tied to anime and manga properties, building a bridge between role-players and fans who might never have bought a traditional game book.

That publishing instinct was smart. A licensed book could be useful at the table, but it could also sit on an anime fan’s shelf as a lore guide. In a pre-streaming era, when information about imported series could be scattered and hard to find, that mattered.

Guardians of Order also grew beyond magical girls and anime comedy. Silver Age Sentinels pushed Tri-Stat into superhero territory. Tri-Stat dX tried to turn the engine into a wider universal system. The company touched cyberpunk, urban fantasy, prestige licenses, and major fantasy fiction.

For a while, it looked like a small Canadian publisher had found a way to compete by being nimble, stylish, and fan-literate.

The Hard Middle

The honest version of MacKinnon’s story cannot skip the collapse of Guardians of Order.

By the mid-2000s, the company was in trouble. The RPG market had shifted hard around the d20 boom and the crash that followed. Guardians of Order had expanded aggressively. Currency changes hurt a Canadian company selling heavily into the United States. Products were late. Cash flow tightened. The company’s final major prestige project, A Game of Thrones Roleplaying, was acclaimed and award-nominated, but arrived too late to save the business.

In July 2006, George R.R. Martin publicly announced that Guardians of Order was closing. He wrote that orders appeared unfulfilled, emails unanswered, the office vacated, and the phone disconnected. MacKinnon then confirmed that the company had ceased operations.

For customers, freelancers, and partners, that was not an abstract business lesson. It was a mess. People had paid for books. Creators reported unpaid work. Third-party partners connected to Guardians of Order’s publishing arrangements were left angry and exposed. The company’s collapse became one of the cautionary stories of independent RPG publishing.

That has to stay in the profile because it is part of the legacy. Not as a cheap shot. Not as a permanent sentence that cancels the design work. But as a real boundary around the praise.

Guardians of Order did important things. It also failed in ways that hurt people.

The Second Act

MacKinnon did something unusual after that. He left tabletop publishing and built a different public life.

He worked in real estate and local business. He became involved in Guelph civic life, served two terms on city council, and helped open The Boardroom, a local game cafe. In 2019, he and another councillor sold their stake in the cafe because downtown development matters could create conflict-of-interest concerns with their council roles.

That civic turn matters because it complicates the simple comeback story. MacKinnon did not vanish, then reappear with a logo. He spent years outside RPG publishing in work that demanded public accountability, budgeting, communication, and local trust.

Then Dyskami Publishing brought him back to games.

Dyskami’s first years were careful by necessity. MacKinnon’s return was watched closely by people who remembered Guardians of Order. The company had to do more than announce products. It had to deliver them.

Over time, Dyskami moved from board games back into MacKinnon’s old territory: anime, licenses, flexible systems, and the long shadow of BESM.

Reclaiming The System

The most important part of the second act is that MacKinnon eventually returned to BESM itself.

BESM Fourth Edition brought the game back under Dyskami’s publishing direction. The new edition updated the presentation, expanded the line, and reintroduced the anime multigenre promise to a market now shaped by crowdfunding, digital communities, and the dominance of Fifth Edition fantasy.

Anime 5E was the most revealing hybrid. In one sense, it echoed the earlier d20 adaptation era. In another, it showed that MacKinnon had learned where the modern audience was. Instead of pretending the wider market did not exist, Anime 5E tried to graft anime customization onto a Fifth Edition fantasy frame.

That is very MacKinnon. He keeps returning to the same design problem: how do you let players build the character in their head without forcing them through a giant machine?

In 2024, Dyskami announced that it had acquired the BESM and Tri-Stat rights from Paradox Interactive. That brought MacKinnon’s earliest major creation fully back into his company’s hands. Dyskami followed with BESM Retro Second Edition and continued support for BESM Fourth Edition, Anime 5E, Absolute Power, and the wider Tri-Stat family.

In 2025, Dyskami announced Tri-Stat Refined, a more narrative-facing version of the system, and the Heart Attack RPG, a licensed dual-system release using both Tri-Stat and Powered by the Apocalypse. That is not nostalgia. That is active design work.

What He Actually Built

MacKinnon did not invent anime fandom at the table. He did not make the only anime RPG. He did not run a company without serious harm when it failed.

What he built was the most visible and durable Western anime RPG framework of its generation.

BESM made anime character logic accessible. Tri-Stat reduced the core of a character to three clear measures, then let abilities and drawbacks carry the wild specificity of the source material. Guardians of Order showed that anime licenses could be treated as RPG books, fan references, and cultural bridges at the same time. Dyskami proved that the design language could survive its original company, return through crowdfunding, and keep evolving.

The cost is part of the history. The Guardians of Order collapse left damage behind. Any profile that turns MacKinnon into a simple redemption arc is too clean. Any profile that treats the collapse as the only thing that matters is too narrow.

The more useful truth is harder: he was both a pioneer and a cautionary example. He opened a door for anime role-playing in the West, then lived long enough in the industry to walk back through that door with a new company and the old system in his hands.

Where To Find Him

The clearest public home for MacKinnon’s game work is Dyskami Publishing Company. Dyskami currently supports BESM Fourth Edition, BESM Retro Second Edition, Anime 5E, Absolute Power, Tri-Stat products, and related releases.

In 2024, Dyskami announced that it had acquired the BESM and Tri-Stat rights from Paradox Interactive. In 2025, the company announced Tri-Stat Refined and the Heart Attack RPG license with Skybound Entertainment. GuelphToday also reported in 2024 that MacKinnon had been hired as communications advisor to Guelph Mayor Cam Guthrie, connecting his publishing background and civic work in a different public role.

That combination is strange, but fitting. MacKinnon’s career has always lived between worlds: anime and RPGs, fans and licenses, universal systems and specific shows, public service and private publishing, collapse and return.

His legacy is not spotless. It is not simple. But it is real. Mark C. MacKinnon made anime playable at the tabletop, lost the company that carried that idea, then rebuilt around the system until it came home.