Game Wizards: The Epic Battle for Dungeons & Dragons

This is essentially a business history of TSR, the company that produces Dungeons and Dragons, for the first 10 years of its existence, by which time both of the game's co-creators, Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax, were ousted from the company. I came to the book vaguely familiar with the origins of the game and the rancor between Arneson and Gygax, and I instinctively sided with Arneson, the underdog in the fight. But having read the book my sympathy for Arneson is tempered by the realization that he was a giant pain in the ass and he either had little talent or willingness to actually write the rules of a game. Gygax also does not come off well either--TSR was riddled with nepotism, mostly due to the family of the Blumes (co-owners of show more TSR), but also due to Gygax's own family, and Gygax certainly seems complicit in clawing back profit-sharing schemes initially offered to contributors to D&D.

This book is a vast improvement over Peterson's sprawling "Playing the World"--it is more focused and is interested in the technical arcana of the game. show less

Jon Peterson has made a name for himself as a gaming historian. His rightly lauded and fastidiously researched Playing at the World may well be the definitive treatment of the historical antecedents of modern role-playing games across the centuries.

Game Wizards: The Epic Battle for Dungeons & Dragons tackles a more focused topic: the creation of D&D and the first 12 years of Tactical Studies Rules (TSR) from its founding to the fateful evening when Gary Gygax was removed from direct control of the company. Peterson is particularly interested in divining credit for the game’s creation, sifting through the competing claims of Gygax and Dave Arneson, and detailing the (mis)management of TSR which led to Gygax inadvertently placing show more himself in danger of losing the company he co-founded.

Like Playing at the World, Game Wizards is well-researched with 30 pages of endnotes citing various trade magazines, columns in Dragon, and other sources. But what makes the book more readable than, say, Playing at the World is that Game Wizards has a compelling narrative on which to hang the various financial figures and convention numbers. No one thought Dungeons & Dragon would be an especially profitable idea (Peterson regularly reminds us that Gygax and Arneson thought it might be a “$300 idea”). So when the game takes off, what had been built on nebulous contracts and verbal agreements quickly becomes the focus of intense legal battles as various players seek their piece of the pie.

At yet those battles seem to have been exacerbated by the interpersonal conflicts that inevitably arose when a bunch of hobbyists tried to run a business. Broken promises, poor HR policies and procedures, and the lure of wealth and fame seem to have taken its toll on those who initially banded together to bring D&D to life, leading to the sad but inevitable climax of Gygax’s reign.

Game Wizards is a treat for RPG fans, especially those (like me) who came to the hobby well after the events it depicts. I highly recommend it. show less

Game Wizards might be subtitled "never meet your heroes". TTRPGs are one of my primary hobbies. D&D turned 50 in 2024, and both Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson are credited as inventive geniuses behind the hobby. Peterson's history reveals legal and corporate battles and every manner of personality flaw, as the battle between the 'founders' of D&D played out in courts and the hobbyist press.

In the early 1970s, Gygax and Arneson were both serious amateur gamers. Gygax had written a medieval wargame called Chainmail, and idly added some fantastic elements from sword and sorcery books and Lord of the Rings. Arneson used Chainmail to run the Dungeon of Blackmoor, an unconventional game where many participants each controlled a single unit show more against Arneson's traps and monsters. The two of them decided that they had something, and wrote up a little pamphlet called Dungeons and Dragons. Together with a local gamer and machinist, Brian Blume, they scraped together a few thousands dollars for a print run and began selling the game to the small but intense community of wargamers.

What they had was a spark that lit that community on fire. D&D expanded exponentially year over year, along with the company, TSR, that Gygax and Blume had founded to publish it. But the partnership fractured almost as quickly as it was founded. Arneson moved to the small town of Lake Geneva to help with the company, but wound up doing grunt labor in the shipping department rather than creative work (Arneson's creative work, or lack thereof, is another issue). The two 'cocreators' split up, and the hastily drafted royalty agreement between the two amateurs would provide fodder for a decade of lawsuits.

Arneson drifted around the community, promising and continuously failing to write multiple new games, and complaining that Gygax was stealing his credit and money to anyone that would listen. Meanwhile. Gygax was acting the big man, a star at gaming conventions who started breaking out into the mainstream as D&D became a fad in 1980s. TSR grew rapidly as well, employing hundreds of people and dozens of relatives of both Gygax and Blume. Gygax picked fights with every other company in the industry, liberally threatening lawsuits over unenforceable rules and arguing that if it wasn't TSR and official D&D, it was crap.

Gygax wasn't much of a manager by his own admission. But he also wasn't much of a creative. It's hard to say what words or ideas he contributed to the game after say, 1977. He spent most of the 1980s in California, trying without success to turn D&D into a movie. Meanwhile, he went from abject poverty to owning a 29 acre horse estate with a mansion, to a messy divorce. When TSR hit headwinds in 1984, the ramshackle corporate governance and uncontrolled spending turned into a hemorrhage. Gygax met Lorraine Williams, heir to the Buck Rogers IP, and she forced him out in a coup in 1985.

A secondary theme is the Satanic Panic. D&D was associated with the disappearance of a troubled MSU student, and was blamed by opportunistic Moral Majority types for corrupting the youth and teaching real witchcraft. Ironically, both Gygax and Arneson were devout Christians (well, Gygax was a Jehovah's Witness, but close enough.) There were some minor changes around divine and supernatural themes, but the controversy likely helped spread the game.

The story revealed in Game Wizards is of two men who had an odd idea, and who were consumed by their success. Neither ever didn't anything close to as significant as D&D. I'm unclear if Arneson did anything later in his life. Gygax's jealousy of other designers and fruitless obsession with a movie doesn't come off well either. But by the late 1990s, when D&D was purchased by Wizards of the Coast, enough time had passed that the two could be wheeled out as grand old men of the hobby. show less

As an enthusiastic teenage dungeon master, I enjoyed this history of the development, marketing, and growth of the game. The main thread here is the tale of Dave Arneson as co-creator with Gary Gygax of the game and the many years Arneson invested in claiming royalties for publications based on his original work. Mostly, this legal wrangling is tedious. However, it was interesting to learn that copyright relates to written works, but not ideas and concepts.

The Copyright Office factsheet on games explains exactly this: Copyright does not protect the idea for game, its name or title, or the method or methods for playing it. Nor does copyright protect any idea, system, method, device, or trademark material involved in developing,

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merchandising, or playing a game.

- "It's How You Play the Game", americanbar.org

Despite these apparent obstacles to a meaningful claim, did not seem to substantially deter Arneson from appreciable success over those years.

Gygax himself, a Christian cobbler arising from humble means, comes across as dictatorial, petty, and later outmaneuvered in the boardroom. Apparently anxiety-induced illnesses cripple him at the highpoint of his success and his adultery upsets his home life. Home life was basically part of work life, too, since the nepotism of the Gygax and his business partner Brian Blume. Maybe these dynamics were at least part to blame for the mishandling of the company's success. I can be no judge of that and even the human failings are more banal than salacious.

For me the most interesting part of was the choppy waters of the Satanic panic era. I myself saw my afterschool D&D group disbanded due to a clamorous few as recounted here in a case in Utah. The other D&D controversies had been dimmer memories to me. For instance, I recall book editions having content removed, which was both for trademark (Tolkien,) and controversy ("demigods") reasons. At the time I found it merely amusing.

It was more interesting the whole D&D in tunnels thing which apparently was less real than I thought at the time. This book sort out the mystery of Dallas Egbert from the flamboyant, publicity hound detective William Dear. (This story connects the Michigan I was born in to the Louisiana I now live in.) From this much-ado-about-nothing, came the Mazes and Monsters and all the waters were muddied by the roiling of folk devils and moral panics.

[I was gratefully provided with a copy of this engaging book in exchange for an honest review.]] show less

Bought this on a whim while at the game store. Very well written, lots of nice anecdotes. But still a history book. I did read "Playing at the World" which addresses some of the issues, though in less detail, so that might have hurt my impression overall.

Didn't get a lot out of it.

There are no heroes here, and definitely no business people either. Amazing that D&D even made it out of the 70s or early 80s