Friday, 1-28-5
The Dungeons and Dragons role playing game has just turned 30 years old. I was a major nerd and a big fan of the game. I have recently thought about getting back into it since I haven’t really played since high-school. The last memory I have of the game is, “No Fred, you can’t have a 17th level 8-foot Chaotic-Evil vampire fighter/barbarian with all 18-00 stats and a -10 AC.”
The game was set forth primarily by (Ernest) Gary Gygax in 1974. He approached Avalon Hill with the game and they passed so he created his own company to produce the game, TSR. I’ve always heard about the TSR/Gygax split and never understood why someone would leave a growing industry when their name is synonymous with the game itself. There are many rumors about why. Most start out with TSR being split evenly 3 ways. When one guy (Kaye) died in 1976, Gygax bought his shares and soon realized he was overextended and had to sell half his holdings to the third guy (Blume). The company ran up debt and Blume was ousted and sold out to Lorraine Williams. This is where the rumors split.
One story I read says he was using cocaine and ended up in a divorce. He had borrowed the money to start TSR from his in-laws and never paid it back so they owned the company when he got divorced. Interesting but probably false.
Another leaves out the drugs and in-laws and just says that the wife acquired half his shares in the divorce and sold him out to the new owner, Williams.
Yet another, and probably the most true, is that he just sold his shares because he thought Williams would run the company into the ground and just jumped ship before any more damage could be done. It looks like he was right.
An interesting side note, Williams did run the company into the ground and eventually sold to Wizards of the Coast. WotC has since been bought out by Hasbro who also owns Avalon Hill.
An interesting enough story to those of us that form the D&D sub-culture and understand terms like, “THAC0″, “Alignment Check” and “Dice Fight!”
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