Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

2023 reads, #21. As a member of Generation X, I of course obsessively played the roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons way back in the late '70s right after the game had been invented (I bought my first Basic boxed set in 1978, just one year after they began being sold, then moved to Advanced D&D a year later); but unlike the Gen-X males who went on to be lifelong gamers (of not only RPGs but then tabletop games and then videogames), I gave up on gaming of all kinds for good a few years later as a teen in the early '80s, as my focus shifted much more to things like music and girls. So, I largely missed all the drama at the time when D&D creator Gary Gygax was forced out of his own company in 1985, then with the new executives managing to run the company completely into the ground in just over another decade after that, through a series of decisions so bad it makes the head spin still to this day, eventually going bankrupt and being bought for a pittance by their rivals, the now massive multinational corporation Wizards Of The Coast. That makes me glad for books like the new Slaying the Dragon, a clear and plainly written guide to the ultra-fascinating proceedings, penned by gaming-focused journalist Ben Riggs (who among other bona fides publishes regularly with Felicia Day's "Geek & Sundry" multimedia content company).

Under his sure hand (if not dipping a little too often into Joss Whedon-level purple prose), the story he paints is almost ridiculously easy to understand in hindsight: a group of dysfunctional, nerdy gamers in a small town in Wisconsin, who are used to "publishing" their guides as xeroxed booklets and maybe selling in the hundreds if they're lucky, catch lightning in a bottle by inventing the world's first intellectually-based (i.e. doesn't rely on miniatures) roleplaying game, at the exact moment in history the entire general public is hungry for such a game. Suddenly they're selling out left and right, and quickly realize they could be selling in the millions if they can get their shit together enough to actually scale up to that level; but unfortunately, they're all a bunch of dysfunctional nerdy gamers in a small town in Wisconsin and therefore not up to the task, making TSR almost fold not even a decade after they began.

That's when Gygax was convinced to invite in the sister of a friend, the now notorious villain Lorraine Williams, which as far as I can tell happened because she was the only person any of them knew who actually had an MBA from a business school; but unfortunately she turned out to be one of those people who was probably at the bottom of her class at that business school, skating by with a D+ average, just barely understanding the basics of how to run a corporation, and not smart enough to understand that big risky decisions can easily blow up in your face. This then seemed to be combined with a thoroughly unpleasant personality, one of those permanently sour fucks who notoriously thought she was morally better than the nerdy artists and writers who produced all of TSR's contents, with the kind of cold sociopathy that lets someone casually commit horribly offensive, dispiriting corporate acts with a bored wave of the hand, and an monomania that Riggs cleverly describes as "speedboat thinking" (as in, if you're a rich asshole who owns a speedboat, then you get to do whatever the fuck you want to do with the speedboat, even crash it into a brick wall if you want, because you're the rich asshole and you own the speedboat, plebes).

That led to a series of bad decisions from day 1 of Williams' reign, which began by her sneaking around behind Gygax's back and purchasing a 51% ownership of the company, then immediately firing him without even a two-week notice or a kiss goodbye, then leading to a series of evermore bungling and hole-digging mistakes as the years continued, which instead of humbly fixing caused Williams to react with evermore indignation and defensive posturing. Just to name one example out of hundreds I could (and bear with me for the long story), at a certain point TSR was partnering with DC Comics to put out a line of popular D&D titles, but Williams started insisting that they also do a title about Buck Rogers, because Williams' family just happened to own the rights to Buck Rogers (her grandfather, newspaper executive Frank Lille, was willed it by the character's creator, Philip Francis Nowlan, as a thank-you for helping him get it sold to syndicates in the first place), and so she was constantly shoving the intellectual property down everyone's throats so her family could make another extra buck on top of everything else TSR was making.

Problem was, in the '90s Buck Rogers stank from the leftover reek of the cheesy '70s adaptation, before it had become retro and warmly remembered, and before the explosion of big-budget superhero movies, so TSR took a hard pass. Now incensed, Williams impulsively decided to start an entire new comic book division of TSR, despite no one there actually knowing anything about how to write, draw, ink, print, publish or distribute comics, and suddenly threw tens of millions of dollars at it; and DC, rightly pissed, took them to court over the deal they supposed had with them. Williams was then forced to come up with a shaky legal loophole, calling their product "comic modules" that come with both a comic story and a cut-out mini-game in the back of each issue, which was just enough to stop the lawsuit; but DC reacted by canceling all their D&D lines but retaining their exclusive right over it, making TSR not only lose out on missing revenue but double-lose by not being able to actually publish D&D comics through TSR Comics. Now add that their exclusive distributorship at the time with Waldenbooks had the comics stored in the gaming aisle where the comics kids never saw them, that the gamer kids didn't like the games, and that the comics kids weren't about to cut up their collectible comics, and suddenly TSR was gushing money, simply because Williams combined bad business sense with a grating personality.

And this is to say nothing of how the company finally ends, where Williams really shows off her D+ in business school by engaging in such ultra-risky behavior as "sectioning" [that is, when a proven profitable company presells that year's profits at an 18% loss to an investment bank, in return for getting all the cash at once at the beginning of the year, so to cook the books and look like they're doing much better than they actually are], and taking advantage of the 150-year-old "gentlemen's agreement" between publishers and brick-and-mortar bookstores, where the stores pay immediately for all books they might order from a publisher, but have the legal right to send back unsold copies a few months or a year later and get a full refund, with TSR in the early '90s shipping millions of extra copies of merchandise to Waldenbooks nationwide to get the cash for them fast, and deciding to worry later about what happens when Waldenbooks returns all that unsold merchandise and demands their money back. Which of course is what they notoriously did a few years later, right when the Great Comics And Gaming Crash Of The Mid-'90s happened and everyone's chits were called in, the company finding themselves now with a whopping $30 million in unpaid debt, which led to mass firings five days before Christmas (because of course it did), then their bankruptcy and acquisition by Wizards Of The Coast six months after that.

There's a whole lot more here to discover, so don't let today's extra-long writeup make you think I'm telling you the entire story; we haven't even touched today, for example, on Gary Gygax's insane turn in the early '80s starting up an LA production company for TSR, in which he bought a luxury home in the Hollywood Hills and started having these crazy drug and sex parties, having meetings with people like Orson Welles about being in a big-budget D&D movie, and all kinds of other nutso details about the whole saga over this book's fast-reading 300 pages. But perhaps one of the most fascinating details, and something I'm glad Riggs was able to get in right at the end of the book, was how Wizards founder Peter Adkison is almost like the anti-Williams: he's brutally honest with himself about his strengths and weaknesses (Wizards' first attempt at a product was written by him, but everyone hated it, and he realized he needed to start hiring outside creatives); he saw the writing on the wall early (their first official product was an add-on manual for an RPG, and when it bombed he saw that the industry was about to crash); he understood that great ideas often come from identifying a need (their massive seller -- nay, society changer -- "Magic: The Gathering" was inspired by him going to sci-fi conventions and seeing conventioneers endlessly spending 20-minute periods hanging out in hallways waiting for banquet rooms to open, and realizing they desperately needed a mini-game easy to carry that could provide exactly 20 minutes of legitimately thrilling fun); and he recognized and rewarded talent (his first employee went on to be the world's first female CEO of a gaming company, going all the way back to Parker Brothers and the like). People like to paint Wizards as a giant faceless corporation that swept in and picked up D&D for a song and then blanded it out to its listless state it's now in; but it's good for Riggs to remind us that they started as just another small nerdy gaming company too, but in their case knew how to do everything right, which is how they ended up being such a massive success and a shadow over all of gaming that they now are.

So, yes, a lot here to take in, a kind of simply written but conceptually sweeping look at...well, really, the whole of American society from the late-'70s to late-'90s, which is why this will appeal so much to so many middle-agers out there, even if told through this interesting but ultra-niche corner of society dedicated to the rise, fall, then normalizing of this brand-new form of entertainment that suddenly cropped up out of the blue. It comes strongly recommended, and will undoubtedly be making my Best Of The Year list I'll be publishing later in December.