August 19, 2019 • 48 mins
In the 1970s, a company called TSR, formed by wargaming enthusiasts, published a genre-defining game called Dungeons and Dragons. But the story of the company might be more legendary than any fantasy quest.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Business on the Brink, a production from I
Heart Radio and How Stuff Works. There is no magic
potion to guarantee company success, but TSR sure seemed to
have cast a spell on gamers with its release of
Dungeons and Dragons from War to Fantasy. They mixed imaginary
(00:24):
worlds with real time tactics and strategy to create a
prize of a hobby, but consumer concern mixed with barbaric
in fighting and sneak thievery not really soon left t
S are Incorporated and Gary Gygax's Dragon find out all
about this company's epic quest on t SR on the Brain. Here, everybody,
(00:54):
I'm Jonathan Strickland and I'm Ariel Casting, and we've got
another episode that is thanks to a listener quests. Yes,
it's actually one of the first episode requests we ever got.
We've been sitting on it while we're trying to balance
out our geeky topics and are not geeky topics And
this one comes from Brandon's Stoddard, who is game guru,
super awesome guy. Yeah, we'll talk a little bit more
(01:16):
about him at the end of the episode. And uh,
as it turns out, the full story of TSR is
a really really big one because even though the company
is just a few decades old, it's gone through a
lot of changes since it first came into being in
the early, well mid seventies. Yeah, and the request is
actually for t s are uh Wizards of the Coast
(01:38):
because they do intertwine and it's very important their interactions together.
But it is such a big story, we're going to
have to break it out into two. We're focusing on
the TSR side now, and then in our next episode
we'll focus on Wizards of the Coast. Yeah, there'll be
a little bit more TSR clean up to do because
it gets crazy, y'all. So to give you a sense
(01:58):
of our own personal connection with this topic, I played
my first Dungeons and Dragons game session when I was
maybe eight or nine years old. My dad was enthusiastically
trying to teach me, and I was enthusiastically young enough
to not pay attention. But as a teenager, I became
the dungeon master for a series of games. That's the
(02:19):
person who runs the gaming sessions, and my friends would
come over every couple of weeks and we would play
D and D. And this was with the first and
second edition of the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons rule set. Yeah,
I first played D and D around years old. I
had begun with LARPing and playing magic the Gathering, which
(02:39):
actually the music director at my church UH introduced me
to UM and then I would I started playing D
and D campaigns and and other role playing games with
my LARPing friends. So let's talk about the history of this. Well.
Also for those of you who are not fully informed
on what role playing games are, we'll cover that as well.
(03:00):
So in the beginning, where do we start? All right?
So ts ARE Incorporated, which as we said, is known
for Dungeons and Dragons or D and D was started
in nineteen seventy two by Gary guy Jax and Don
kay On about a thousand dollars, and TSR stood for
Tactical Studies Rules. In fact, that was the name of it.
It wasn't shortened to TSR yet UM Brian Bloom and
(03:23):
Dave Arnisson joined into the company. Dave Arniston just for
a short period of time. He actually helped Gary guy
Jax create Dungeons and Dragons, but he wasn't brought into
the company, and shortly after Blue mounted two thousand dollars
into the company, invested into the company's startup funds, and
he eventually became CEO and his brother would also becoming
(03:44):
an early investor in the company. Yep, and uh. They
decided that they needed a company because Gary, Guy Jax,
and Arniston had together come up with a rule set
for this Dungeons and Dragons game. And they came up
with rules, but then they had to find a way
of getting that rule set out to players. Yeah. Yeah,
(04:07):
so they needed to have a business in order to
do that. It was this is pre Internet, or at
least pre public Internet, so there was no way to
reach out to people directly. Yeah, and and Artison wasn't
much of a business guy, so that's why it fell
to guy X and K. So this, by the way,
it would be one of the very first role playing games.
(04:29):
In fact, arguably you could say this was the first
role playing game, and it grew out of the war
gaming hobby. And in war gaming, players control anything from
huge armies to small squadrons in tactical battles. Typically they're
using miniatures and little manature settings to represent you know, battlegrounds,
and they might use stuff like dice to help determine outcomes.
(04:51):
The difference here is that Dungeons and Dragons would put
players in charge of controlling just a single character, not
a squad, not in army, not a battalion, and ideally
you would flesh that character out so that the character
has his or her own personality, goals, motivations, et cetera. Now,
the person running the game would have multiple characters they
(05:12):
were playing or n PCs. In four, uh, the company
came out with their first limited run of the game,
a thousand copies. They were all hand assembled, and they
all sold out. Yeah, yeah, it was. It was rapidly
seen as something that gamers were actually eager to try out. Yeah.
And then in five they changed the company's name to
TSR Hobbies, which, honestly, I think it's better to shorten
(05:35):
it down from tactical studies rules. Personally, after k passed
away and his share of these company passed to his
wife Um, in March of that year, Guy GaX sort
a letter to another game designer and said, quote, we
will never allow TSR to become a company which is
run by any outside group. That is, we may take
others in as partners. Eventually, but we'll never seek any
(05:57):
non war gamer capitalization. Uh. But to do this, they
needed a better structure to their company, and they didn't
really have it. They were just working as a partnership. Yeah,
so it was very loosey goosey, like they were kind
of creating stuff on demand, and they didn't really have
a good, uh foundation to work from. So Guy GaX
(06:20):
and Bloom incorporated TSR Hobbies, you know, officially became TSR
Hobbies Incorporated. Initially, they did it as an organization to
handle mail orders of the game's rules, and then they
were also looking at the possibility of opening up an
actual physical brick and mortar style store in Wisconsin. But
then they decided, let's repurpose this company and we're going
(06:41):
to use it to buy out the assets of the partnership.
In other words, to actually buy the intellectual property that
this partnership owned, and that would free up Donna Kay,
that was Kay's wife. She had been working with the
company but for no salary. In fact, no one had
a salary because they weren't getting enough rev new regularly
to pay salaries. And she wasn't really interested in working
(07:05):
for a company that couldn't afford to pay, and this
gave them the opportunity to to buy her out and
to formalize the corporate structure. That must have been a
relief for her. Yeah, yeah. And it was at this
stage that Bloom and guy GaX would receive shares in
this new incorporated organization. It was privately held, so these
aren't public shares, they're just it's it's stuck in the company. Yes,
(07:29):
to show the the extent of ownership of each party,
each investor in the company, Guy GaX was awarded one
hundred fifty shares, Bloom got one hundred, but then Melvin Bloom,
the father of the Bloom Boys, he would purchase two
hundred shares at one hundred dollars apiece. Brian purchased an
(07:49):
additional one hundred forty shares at that same price. So
while the initial shares to guy GaX and Bloom were
awarded based on their work in the partnership, like how
much time and effort and the initial investment they had
put into it, uh, the additional shares that were issued
would represent a thirty four thousand dollar investment from the
(08:11):
Bloom family, So the Blooms would own four hundred forty
shares collectively, Guy GaX only had one fifty, so he
became a minority shareholder in the company, but he would
still remain the president of that company. I'm honestly kind
of surprised that he let them do that. It was
probably not so much letting as a necessity, because again
(08:33):
that's where the investment money was coming from. But as
we will see, this would become the seed of a
much bigger problem later on. At this point in time,
things seem to be going pretty well for TFR hobbies.
Runs of the game continue to sell out by the thousands.
So they'd released a couple of thousand, then a few
more thousand, and then five thousand at a time, and
(08:54):
they'd all sell out, and then all that while they
were also creating new campaigns for the game, new uplements,
new modules, and releasing all of these new additions to
the game. So you buy your core Dungeons and Dragons game,
and then you buy all these additional adventures and classes
and things and rules that you can integrate, a trend
(09:14):
that continues to this day and ends up becoming the
lamentation of many a gamer. But you see, I love it.
I mean I I ended up collecting a lot of
them too, And if you were to put together, for example,
all of my A, D and D second addition stuff
in one place, you're probably looking around five six hundred
dollars worth of supplements total. I think I was more
(09:35):
of a third fourth edition girl myself, although I have
played original modules. Um So, around nine six, their revenues
were somewhere in the range of three hundred thousand dollars,
and they started subcontracting out their printing an assembly to
meet the demand that they were getting for this game.
(09:56):
And at this time they were finally able to pay
salaries to at least Gary guy GaX and Brian Bloom. Yeah. Now,
also in nineteen seventy six, Brian Bloom would ask his
brother Kevin to help the company manage corporate finances, and
Kevin initially served as the controller and treasurer for TSR Hobbies.
In he would join Brian and Gary to become one
(10:18):
of the three members of the board of directors. More
on that later too. Now, between nineteen seventy five and
nineteen seventy seven, Gary guy GaX and Brian Bloom had
opportunities to purchase up to seven hundred more shares as
the company grew, and this was at that same price
of one hundred dollars per share, and that would remain
the same no matter how big the company grew. They
(10:41):
had that option to purchase seven hundred more shares, but
would always be at that one hundred dollars even if
the shares were valued higher than that. At that point,
uh gradually guy GaX would own about a third of
the company. Brian would always maintain a slight lead of
a hundred shares over guy GaX for most of TSR
Hobbies existence. That would change a little bit later. Melvin
(11:04):
the father would not purchase more shares, so he actually
got left behind as the both Gary guy GaX and
Brian Bloom began to exercise these options, and gradually the
Bloom family's ownership of the company would drop below ownership,
so they would no longer have controlling interest in the company.
At that point, in fact, no party would own controlling interest.
(11:27):
No one had or more of the ownership, and that
also will become important later on. So in ninety seven,
the game was actually divided out into two games, a
basic version of D and D and Advanced D and D.
The basic version came with dice and from what I understand,
it was prepackaged modules and pregenerated characters and things like that. Well, yeah,
(11:48):
and you also had very limited character classes. For example,
Elf was a class. Yeah, you could, you could play
an Elf, and that was what it wasn't just your
your character's race, it's what they were like, it's their occupation. Yeah.
And the advance version had a Monster manual with more monsters, classes,
racist things like that that came with it, um and
(12:08):
you could play them or play with them, or fight
them or fight them. Yeah, it all depended on the scenario.
And like obviously, some game masters would buy these pre
made modules, sometimes not even making any changes to them.
Sometimes they would change them dramatically. And some people like
me would design their own adventures but use the rules
(12:30):
to define, you know, how those adventures actually work. Yeah.
And then in they actually got their brick and mortar,
they moved out of Gary Gygax's basement into a space
above a hobby shop in Lake Genevo, Wisconsin. So now
we get to nineteen seventy nine, and this is an
event that could have been a make or break moment
(12:52):
for a young company and involved the mysterious disappearance of
a college student and a private investigators hunch that face
the blame squarely on a little known game called Dungeons
and Dragons. Will explain more in just a second, but
first let's take a quick break. Okay, So, at Michigan
(13:13):
State University there was a student named James Dallas Egbert
the third and he went missing, and it became a
really big story. The family hired on a private eye
to investigate this disappearance, and he found out that Egbert,
like some of the other college students in the area,
had played a game called Dungeons and Dragons. The investigator theorized,
(13:34):
apparently with no actual evidence, that the game had somehow
triggered a psychosis with an Egbert, and that he was
most likely wandering through the steam tunnels beneath his college's campus,
slaying imaginary monsters and questing for treasure. This, by the way,
became the plot of a Tom Hanks movie in the
early eighties, What's the name of Mazes and Monsters? I
(13:56):
think it's It's I forget it was. It was like
a made for TV movie. It is, by the way,
absolutely terrible and sometimes terrible in the most wonderful ways.
It seems like an it seems like it would be
uh a dicey at best movie. But it also seems
like this, this theory that the investor came up with
(14:17):
is just very far fetched. Yeah, no, there was. It
was largely based on a deep misunderstanding of what a
role playing game is. There also had been reports there
were students on campus who would do the equivalent of
LARPing live action role playing, and so it was kind
of a leap to go from oh, these are people
who are playing out pretend roles and having these adventures
(14:42):
to these are people who believe themselves to be these
pretend roles. I mean as a as a LARPer currently. Sorry,
people who that's too geeky for it's just like they
just lost all respect for you. Yeah. Yeah, Well I'm
also an actor. So it's a fun improv exercise at
the very least, um, at least I don't and the
(15:05):
friends that I play with don't believe they're actually these characters.
It's um, it's make believe. It's a fairy tale. It
also has to do with the fact that it's a
game that involves magic, and so this was right at
the very cusp of the Satanic Panic in the United States,
And so this got a lot of coverage, right, Yeah, absolutely,
the media really focused on this story. I mean it
(15:25):
already is the disappearance of a student, which is it's
that's enough to be a big story in itself. Then
you had this potential connection to this obscure game that
deals with demons and monsters and magic and wizards and
sorcerers and things like that that put D and D
in a larger spotlight. Uh, And it would be the
(15:45):
beginning of a long trend in which people would associate
D and D with psychosis or cults or witchcraft and Satanism.
And like I said, the Satanic Panic, which was a
larger trend. It wasn't just about role playing games. I
mean this involved like rock and roll, music, TV movies,
all these kind of all these different things. People were thinking, oh,
this is a manifestation of a growing cult of Satanists
(16:08):
in the United States who have these very wicked plans
for people, and we have to be on the lookout
because they are out for our immortal souls. And uh, yeah,
this was a this was a huge thing. Like I
grew up in this era, so for me like, I'm like,
this is also the age of things like chick tracks
that would come out about Dungeons and Dragons and about
(16:29):
how it would convince people to do terrible things. Uh
so what was the result of all this? Well, you know,
I think the desired was a result was to get
people to stop playing D and D, stop watching these movies,
these TV shows, things like that. But actually it kind
of got this taboo cult following. People are like, what
is this game that nobody wants me to play? And
(16:51):
so it boosted their sales. It actually ended up being
some of the best marketing that they could look for. Yeah,
and as for Egbert, he actually called up the investor
to Gator. Uh turns out he went to New Orleans. Um,
and there's a lot more sad stuff about that story,
but none of it actually connects to Dungeons and Dragons.
And that's a different story for a different podcasts. Yeah
(17:13):
it is. I mean, if you're interested in hearing about it,
it is very sad. It does not have a happy ending.
But as as Ariel just said, it really doesn't have
anything to do with the rest of our our podcast.
So rather than go down that rabbit hole, we'll we'll
go back to talking about TSR now. One of the
things that makes it hard to talk about TSRs early
days is because they were a private company. Uh, and
(17:35):
as a private company, they were not required to file
detailed financial reports the way public companies have to every year.
They essentially we're just supposed to report things like revenues
and costs so that you know, the I R S
knows how much how much taxes they get from the corporation.
But uh, the company claimed to have made around two
(17:55):
million dollars in sales revenue in nineteen seventy nine. That's
not too shabby considering they started on like somewhere around
one to three thousand dollars. Yeah, it was. It was
also an indication that this was a hobby on the rise,
but that also would cause problems. Yes, but it wasn't
just a hobby on the rise in the States. It
(18:17):
was also getting international appeals. So in nineteen eighty they
started an LTD in the UK to support their international demand.
Also in nineteen eighty, a magazine called inc I n
C Incorporated not not I n K, the tattoo magazine.
Yeah yeah, named ts are one of the top ten
most profitable privately held companies. They've actually got a bunch
(18:38):
of articles on it, and that's because TSR had simited
statements saying that they were making sixty million dollars in
sales or so, which is not bad. Yeah, it means
that from nineteen seventy nine to nineteen eighty they would
have had eight times the amount of sales revenue. That's
an enormous amount of growth. It's like five percent owth
(19:01):
And you might say, well, that's incredible, and it might
be a little too incredible. The wise Wall Street Journal
would actually report in nineteen eighty three that those sales
figures for nineteen eighty were likely closer to eight points
seven million dollars. It's still that's but that's you know,
to go from uh, sixteen to eight that's a she
(19:22):
reduced it by half, so but still a pretty incredible
number from to go from two million to eight point
all no, no, but it does make you question why
the heck is there such a huge discrepancy to go
from sixteen million to eight point seven million. Now it's
possible that it was all just honest mistakes. I mean,
TSR was kind of it was still not really a
(19:44):
rigid corporate structure. Kevin Bloom was not, like the the
best accountant for that kind of job. I mean, this
was something beyond what he had really worked toward before.
So not not saying he was bad, but rather that
he was ill suited for it. Yeah, Guy GaX wasn't
much better. No, Guy GaX was a high school dropout
(20:07):
and a game designer, and and so you had people
who were very passionate about what they were doing, but
they weren't They weren't business minded there. This actually caused problems.
I read in the company there was a module that
was written for the game called The Princess and the
Silver Castle or something like that, and it was actually
the I think the Castle of the Silver Princess. So yeah,
(20:28):
and it kind of they had a game developer write it.
She said, don't let them touch my writing. The owners
didn't really look at it. It went to the game developers.
They put a bunch of in jokes about how the
company was being run and their dissatisfaction into it. And
by the time it made it to print, it didn't
make it to stores, but it made it to print.
(20:48):
And then finally the owner saw it and we're like, no,
we can't, you can't publish this, And it did make
it to some stores, but it was there for all
of one day. On the day that it came out,
it was recalled old and so all the stores were
told to ship back their copies. A few got out
into the wild. Uh. The there are two versions of
this module. There's one that has an orange cover that's
(21:10):
the original version that got scrapped after it initially came out,
and then there's a green version that was completely rewritten.
At A large part of the problem was not just
those in jokes, but art that was let's say, probably
not entirely appropriate for the the intended audience exactly, especially
(21:32):
not in this era of moral panic. Really, what I'm
going to say is if they had had a better
company structure and some R and D, maybe it wouldn't
have even made it two stores or to print um in.
They licensed Dungeons and Dragons to Mattel to make an
electronic version of the game, and it sold out months
before Christmas, which, as we all know, is the biggest
toy and game season and TSR they didn't have to
(21:56):
worry about supply. They just had to collect the royalties
from it. Yep, it was not a not a bad deal,
not not a bad position to be in. Yeah. So
now at this stage they realized they were gonna have
to scale up because the demand was growing. Obviously, even
if you look at the eight point seven million instead
of sixteen million dollars in sales, that's a lot of demand.
(22:19):
So this was not actually easy or well documented at
the time, largely because neither Gary Gygax nor Brian Bloom
had any business management experience or knowledge. Uh. And according
to an article written by John Peterson. This is an
excellent article, by the way, it goes into very deep
detail about what was happening at this time. It's called
the Ambush at Sheridan's Springs. It's published in Medium. I
(22:43):
highly recommend you read this whole article. A lot of
the information I pulled for this episode comes from that article.
But according to him, financial reports from this time period
were at best sporadic and not necessarily accurate. So you
weren't getting frequent financial reports, and when you did get them,
you couldn't be sure that they were reflective of reality. Yeah.
(23:05):
And this was actually made even more difficult because there
were structural changes in the corporation, including one where they
changed when the company's fiscal year began, so in one
they had a fiscal here that was only nine months long. Yeah, yeah,
that does make things much more complicated because also that
that looks like that's a huge impact on sales, right,
if you only have nine months of sales instead of
(23:26):
a full twelve months, then it will suddenly look like
you weren't on your projected path for growth, right, because
but you have to keep in mind, well, that's because
I have fewer months in the year because of the
way we changed our structure. Also, in nineteen eighty one,
Melvin Bloom would transfer his two hundred shares to his
son Kevin, And at that point Kevin Bloom owned around
(23:46):
two hundred five shares including the ones from Melvin, so
he had only had five to start with. And this
was a move that raised some eyebrows actually because it
was thought that it was in violation of the shareholder
agreement that you know, maybe this was against the by
laws of the company, but they went ahead and did
it anyway, and nobody put up enough stink to stop
(24:08):
it. It It was was say, knowing their management capabilities, it's
possible that even if it were in the by laws,
they were giant loopholes they could have gotten away with it.
I haven't read them, so I'm not certain, but it
doesn't seem unplausible. Two, they started translating their games into
other languages, a whole bunch of them, including Finnish, which
(24:29):
is awesome because I like Finland. Um I don't like
it when things are written and finished, because I didn't
even get started, oh chom and And they were still growing.
So this, you know, as we said, this moral panic
wasn't affecting them. Despite their organizational issues. They were still growing.
(24:49):
And part of the reason for that, it's because adventure
games and electronic games both were really getting prominence in
the market. Board games and card games and things like that.
We're taking slight decline, it's just the way the cycle was.
Cycle was going and technology was advancing. Like you could
you could argue that right now we're in sort of
(25:09):
maybe in the tail end of a board game renaissance.
But we saw over the last few years board games
kind of increased in popularity, I think largely because you
started to see people who wanted to find reasons to
hang out with each other in the same space at
the santis opposed to just on Facebook or Instagram. Um.
But another part of their success was that they didn't
really have competition at this point in the role playing
(25:32):
game realm uh, largely due to the fact that, I mean,
they had war games, but they weren't really the same thing,
and other other people who might want to compete with
Dungeons and Dragons. And there's a lot of role playing
games out there now, lord knows, I've played more than
I can count on both hands. Um. But they had
to write rules that people would want to learn and play.
(25:54):
So once you already learned the rules for Dungeons and Dragons,
which were are were and are a little complicated, a
fifth edition makes it a little easier, especially compared to three.
Especially compared to three oh man three you need to spreadsheet.
But um, so it was hard for other other companies
and other people who wrote games to really get in
there and get a market share because people already learned
(26:16):
Dungeons and Dragons. They don't want to invest the time
to learn something new. Yeah. Also, TSR would release a
few other games, uh, not just Dungeons and Dragons. They
were behind a Marvel role playing game as well, so
they would release other role playing games in other realms,
and and they weren't based on the same rule set either,
so that you know, TSR was not really in direct
(26:38):
competition with itself because it was making games that were
for different interests like superheroes versus fantasy. So but they
made sure to diversify a little bit in that realm. Well,
I mean, also, if if I know I like the
way Dungeons and Dragons plays and has written, I'm going
to probably trust that company more for another game. Also,
(26:59):
their manufact acturing costs were low, their overhead was low.
They were able to make product to meet demand as
opposed to having a whole bunch of supply and hoping
people wanted it. They also had a line of credit,
but it never really that that part of it, at
least initially didn't affect them. They were pretty wise on
their spending at that point. Yeah, that would change. So
(27:21):
continuing this running theme of corporate governance confusion where some
conflicting reports on how the company was actually being run.
Doug Bloom can you can you guess who Doug Bloom
was related to? Um Ronald McDonald, no, Brian Kevin and
Melvin Doug Bloom wrote an article for a magazine called
(27:42):
Random Events, which I feel like could describe my life.
But the article said that the president's office was held
by three people that would be Guy GaX and Brian
and Kevin Bloom, and that all decisions were made unanimously.
They had to be a unanimous decision in order to
move forward. If there was disagreement, they could not move forward.
(28:03):
Guy GaX later disputed that description and said that he
had ultimate authority for executive level decisions as president. Board
level decisions were still done unanimously, but anything executive level
in the company. What he said ultimately fell to him
that Brian Bloom was senior executive officer and Kevin Bloom
was the chief operating officer. So then, to make things
(28:28):
more confusing, the company had a reorganization. So in uh
it became known as the Year of three Presidents because
Gary Gygax became president of TSR Hobbies Incorporated, Brian Bloom
would become president of TSR Fun Group, I know, I
kind of which I would be part of a fund group,
(28:49):
and then Kevin Bloom became president of TSR Service Group.
And as you can imagine that didn't clear up things
for anyone. Yeah. So despite all that confusion, the company
was still doing really good business, and they acquired another
gaming company called Simulations Publications, Incorporated. And they also published
(29:10):
a classic pulp fiction magazine called Amazing Stories, which Steven
Spielberg did a TV series based on THEI I think
they're re launching that. Yeah, I believe. We talked about
that in a in an episode of a different show
we used to do. Yeah. Now, based on this booming business,
they you know, they had every reason at that point,
(29:31):
or at least they thought they had every reason to
believe that things were just on the up and up
and going to continue to rise. TSR valued each share
of the company at three thousand dollars. These would be
the same shares that previously had been valued at one
and you could still, if you were guy Gas or
Bloom by one of those seven hundred shares for a
hundred dollars a piece, even though it was now valued
(29:52):
at three thousand dollars otherwise, and again a privately held company,
with most of the shares being hold held by those
three executives. In three they changed their name just to
TSR Incorporated, So they took the hobbies out and they
added a fourth division and entertainment division called Dungeons and
Dragons Entertainment, and Gary guy Yax was sent uh. Jonathan
(30:16):
has in the notes here some might say exiled. I
read conflicting things. Some people are like, oh, he chose
to go. Some people said he was sent, some people
said he was kicked out. He was sent to Hollywood
to develop uh this division as the president of the division.
And that's where we got the D and D cartoon. Yeah.
By the way, if you search online, have you seen
(30:37):
this commercial that I'm referencing on this I haven't have
seen the cartoon. It's amazing. So there's a commercial. Renault
at released a car commercial in Brazil. So it's it's
Brazilian car commercial that features live actors and as you
watch it you realize they are they are the characters
from the dn D cartoon and even the Dungeon Master
(30:57):
makes an appearance in the commercial. It is pretty amazing.
I'm going to have to check that out. Now. Going
to Hollywood meant that Guy GaX had to leave the
day to day operations of TSR to Kevin and Brian Bloom,
who you know. They had controlling stock of the company. Um,
and they we're happy with that. They thought that they
(31:19):
could do a much better job than Gary was doing. Yeah,
they felt that Guy GaX was being far too conservative
and trouble was a ruin because while they were doing
all this, sales of the games were actually on the decline.
The projected revenue for two was forty five million dollars,
but when it was all said and done, the company
only managed about half of that projected amount, and it's
(31:43):
because the market was contracting. It's the same sort of
issue we've talked about with other things, where you reach
market penetration and market saturation, where the market it's now
you've got as much of the product out there as
people want, and you can't you can't just keep putting
the same stuff out because everyone who that it already
bought one. And even if you're coming up with all
these modules and additional adventures, people have to play through
(32:05):
the first ones before they want to go out and
buy new. Yeah, so you either you either have to
revise everything or you have to come up with something
really innovative to drive more sales. But at the time
TSR was starting to find out that it's bread and
Butter was getting a little stale. Yeah, and with that
that little uh C s, I like, yeah, moment, I
(32:30):
think we can take a little break. I need one, Okay,
all right. So while Gary was in California to secure
the whole cartoon thing. Um. And by the way, he
did get Orson Welles to agree to start in a
D and D movie. I don't I don't think that
came to. The only d D movie I could think
(32:50):
of was the really Bad One. Yeah, although Joe mangian Nello, yeah,
he wants to do one, wants to do and he's
a big dn D fan. Um. And while he was
out there, he got word that Kevin and Brian Bloom
were making a real big mess of the company. Yeah,
so they missed those revenue goals that I talked about
(33:11):
and they had to write off the acquisition of a
needlework company. They they had decided that they were going
to diversify and one of the things they bought was
a needlework company because they were actually making money off
of it initially. So like just our our projects that say,
there's no dungeon like home kind of yeah, sort of
like yeah, it's like if if you if you don't
want to play a paladin, you can do some needlework.
(33:34):
But yeah, it turned out that that initial success wasn't
something that was on a projected like the projected path
was not accurate to what was actually happening, so they
had to write off that acquisition. They also had to
secure a four million dollar loan with the American National Bank,
and Kevin Bloom headed up that effort. He would later say, quote,
(33:56):
I was the best there was in the company, but
I wasn't the right person into quote. So there's some
more foreshadowing, and that's this problem where they needed the cash,
they didn't have it on hand. Uh, and ultimately the
deal was probably not the best one for the company.
TSRs creditors also placed a demand on the company to
bring on three outside financial experts to join the board
(34:19):
of directors, which at that time we're still just Gary
guy GaX and Brian and Kevin Bloom. So the Blooms
got to choose because guy GaX was out in California.
So the Blooms chose three new members from the Wisconsin
area of businesses, and those three had no idea about
the games industry. They essentially always voted along with the Blooms,
(34:42):
so it really just added to the Blooms voting power
in the board of directors. It's almost like they planned
it that way. Almost almost Well, Gary comes back. TSR
is suffering from poor sales, are over a million dollars
in debt there on the edge of insolvency. Um me
on these these kind of shifty decisions that the brothers
(35:04):
are making and changes that they're making. They were doing
some weird stuff, like apparently TSR had around seventy company cars.
I've read one report that they were spending company money
to like dredge up a shipwreck or something like that.
They had too much inventory, they were overstaffed. It sounded
a lot like some of the more extravagant expenses you
(35:25):
would hear about during the Internet startup days, where you
would have these dot com companies that would get huge
amounts of investment up front, and then they would blow
all that money on these lavish offices and crazy parties
and have very little to show for it afterwards. That's
kind of what it sounded like, but even though they
were actually still producing games. Yeah, it does sound that way,
(35:47):
but they're still producing games, but the demand is just
not there as much. Yeah, yeah, and so this obviously
is a situation that you can't have go on indefinitely.
So the possibility of outside investors coming in and taking
a majority share in the company arose. Uh. The This
was again against Gary Gygax's wishes, but the rest of
(36:10):
the board wanted it to happen. However, while it initially
looked like it could happen, the company later said it
would undergo a financial restructuring process without outside resources. So
why did this change? Why did it go from the
company is going to bring in outside investors, they're going
to get a majority share or at least a large
share of the company. Why did that change? Well, it's
(36:33):
because that's when guy GaX decided to really jump in.
He exercised his options to get Yeah, he did level up,
he pinged, he got he got his additional shares. He
he exercised that option. So he bought more shares in
the company, and his son Ernie owned shares of the company,
and together their collective shares represented fifty one point one
(36:57):
percent of the total ownership of TSAR. Arrow margin of
control that it's enough for controlling interest. So because he
had control of the company, he could override the other
board members decisions, and he said, let's not do this deal.
And Uh, the way I wrote it in my notes
(37:18):
is that he passed his saving throw and mixed it.
So the company downsized. They reduced their head count down
to nine employees. They had been building steadily at that point.
They at one point, they're up to a hundred and thirty. Yeah,
probably more before this. So they came to the realization
that there projections were not based in reality. That they
(37:41):
were they were based on a fad, not a sustainable trend.
They had made these fictional projections before and it seemed
to go decently well. So yeah, just that game didn't
continue and definitely so by this time, the Blooms would
no longer hold operational positions. Essentially, Guy GaX was like,
all right, it's time for you guys to step down.
(38:02):
But they still owned a large number of shares in
the company, so they remained on the board of directors
for a time. Yes, So with the Blooms out, Gary
really needed somebody else to help manage the company, so
he brought in Lorraine Williams in as a manager to
help a financial stabilization. Uh, Jonathan, you have a note
(38:22):
here that Williams's grandfather wrote some comic books. Yes, the
original publisher of the Buck Rogers comic books. So the
reason why I put that in there is because Williams
came from money. She she already had a pretty substantial
amount of money at her disposal, and that's partly why
(38:42):
Gary Gygax wanted her involvement, because she could invest in
the company and helped give it some much needed financial support,
but also because he had worked with her brother in
Los Angeles. Her brother was in the entertainments industry, and
Gary had encountered him while working to get the D
and D cartoon up and running. And you know, it
(39:03):
seemed like it was working, but that was just a
face value value because Lorraine had had planned out a
little bit of a sabotage. I don't know if she
mentioned as a sabotage, but she certainly did some stuff
in in in the Shadows of Business. Yeah, here's where
we get to the table. Here's where we get to
the real brink for TSR. And for Gary Gygax in particular.
(39:25):
And so pay attention because this is an interesting series
of events, or an unfortunate series of events of you.
So the Blooms wanted out. They were no longer in
executive level positions, but they didn't want to get out
without being fully compensated for the shares they had in
their possession. They had an idea of what the valuation
(39:49):
was for those shares, and they presented that to Gary Gygax.
Uh First of all, they the company looked at potentially
getting a loan for creditors to pay off this amount.
But the creditors took a look at the amount that
the Blooms were asking for and they said, no, your
company is not worth that. We're not going to give
(40:09):
you a loan for a buy back purpose. You can't
do it this way. So then guy GaX was thinking
about maybe using his own money, but the Blooms price
was too high. So there was this back and forth
going on. But then you had Williams there, and so
Williams and the Blooms met behind closed doors and they
met in advance of a big board meeting, and they
(40:30):
concocted an idea. So Williams will put out a down
payment of seventy thousand dollars to the Blooms. That was
enough for their seven hundred shares that they could execute on,
and with three hundred shares of her own and with
the collection of the Blooms shares of stock, she became
the majority shareholder for TSR. Guy GaX. His shares fell
(40:54):
below fift because the number that had been in circulation
at that point Williams had attracted enough of them, and
she and Gary guy GaX, while they had started off
as as being very friendly to one another when they
were working together, Williams became disenchanted with him pretty quickly.
So do you think that might have been impart due
(41:15):
to the Blooms influence? Possibly? I think it's also because
guy GaX himself was pretty conservative with his decisions. He
wanted to focus more on the game's approach. Uh. He
was not as gung ho on the diversification side. He
did plan on not writing everything himself. He wasn't he
had already retired from that perspective of the of the business.
(41:38):
But he didn't want to do some of the big
moves that the Blooms and Williams wanted to do. So
she put the screws to him essentially, and the board
of directors with Williams as the kind of the motivating
factor forced Guy GaX out of the company. That's unfortunate. Yeah,
(42:01):
he actually tried to once he found all this out,
he tried to sue UM the sale of the stock
shares and sue against it and keep it from happening.
And he lost that fight. Uh. You know, Lorraine was CEO.
They shelved a bunch of projects that Gary was currently
working on UM. Not all of them, but a lot
of them. I'm guessing that Orson Wells movie was one
(42:22):
of them, probably probably. Yeah, And she did all this
in six months. Yeah. She had joined the company six
months previously and at this point was now going to
run the company. Yeah. Well, Gary resigned, He sold his
remaining shares in the company and he and and doing that,
he lost the rights to a lot of the things
that he had written and created UM. In an interview
(42:43):
with Wired magazine before he passed away, because he passed
away in two thousand eight UM, he said that he
was fed up and ready to leave at that point anyhow,
he was just done with it UM. And over the
next ten years, Gary would go on to do other
gaming things and there would be legal battles between him
and t s Are over his new projects and the
(43:04):
intellectual property that belonged to D and D and ts ARE.
So that's really unfortunate. Now the company was dealing with
the fallout for this battle for control at the executive level,
as well as with other outside factors, and while ts
Are survived being on the brink of catastrophe for the
time being, it was able to to stay solvent at
(43:27):
that time. It would turn out that another existential crisis
was just a few years away, and we'll cover that
one in the subsequent episode where we introduced Wizards of
the Coast, But at the time they had weathered a
pretty dramatic storm. Like ousting the founder of a company
(43:47):
is a big, big deal, it is. It seems to
me that Gary would have been a lot better off
if if demand for his game had been smaller, if
he had been, to say, stay a small, hobbyist, cobbyist company.
I mean, I'm personally glad that it grew much larger,
(44:07):
or else I may never you know, played these games,
which are an awful lot of fun. Well, and I
think that the rise of Dungeons and Dragons gave way
to trends in mainstream entertainment that we're seeing today, things
like I don't know that we would have the Marvel
Cinematic Universe as it stands today without some of the
(44:30):
ground the groundwork that was laid by stuff like Dungeons
and Dragons, which which kind of introduced more fantastical elements
in entertainment. And like Tolkien had written the Lord of
the Rings trilogy and The Hobbit and all that and
all these other books, but I'm guessing D and D
probably helped encourage movie makers to make those stories into movies. Yeah,
(44:51):
and obviously you've seen lots of other fantasy films that
that definitely uh owe a lot to D n D. Now,
I would say that the lesson to learn here, and
it's one that Ariel and I are very familiar with,
is that when you get a bunch of creative types
together and they have great ideas for a business, whether
it's games or it's theater or some other creative endeavor,
(45:15):
that's fantastic. You definitely need those people, but you also
really need people who know their stuff in business. That
if they had those business minded individuals who had a
deeper understanding of corporate structure and governance so that the
company could perform as a company in a responsible and
accountable way, then perhaps it would not have encountered these
(45:40):
kind of challenges. But Ariel and I have both been
part of groups that were full of creative individuals and
lots of you know, well meaning intention but that were
if not if not if they didn't fail, they struggled
to succeed because we didn't have that business oriented person
(46:02):
there to to say, like, your ideas are great, but
it's my job to tell you which ones are realistic,
which ones aren't. What it's going to take for us
to achieve your vision, that kind of thing. Yeah, that
is that is true. Um, well, I'm really excited to
get into the next episode. Um because it's the struggles
(46:24):
was not over for Dungeons and Dragons at this point,
but no, we're running short on time. Yeah, they the
next the next brink moment would be the part where
Wizards of the Coast come in, and that would not
be the last brink momentum. And of course not all
brink moments are on the brink of disasters. Sometimes are
on the brink of success, stratospheric success. So in our
(46:45):
next episode we will cover that, uh, that module in
the series, the campaign of Dudgeons and Dragons to continue
using the parlance. But before we do that, you wanted
to mention some stuff about our our listener requests. Yeah. So,
as I said, Brandis Stodard requested this TSR Wizards of
the Coast topic. UM. And I know Brandis because I
(47:08):
actually played a larp that he wrote. UM. So he
does freelance game design in writing UM. But he also
does a lot of blogging about gameplay and game theory
and things like that. So we talked a lot about
the business side of of TSR and Dungeons and Dragons,
and he writes about more than just Dungeons and Dragons.
But if you want to explore that side of gaming,
I suggest you check him out on Twitter. He is
(47:30):
at Brandis Stoddard that's b R A N D E
S S t O D D A R d UM
and you can also visit his website that is www
dot brandon starter dot com and check out some of
the gameplay stuff that he's written. Now, if people want
to reach out like Brandis did and ask us to
cover something, what email address should they use, Well, they
(47:50):
can email us at Feedback at the Brink podcast dot show.
And if you want to check out more information about
us and look at the archive of all our our
past episode. Le's go to our website. That's the Rink,
a podcast dot show. You'll find all that there. Until
next time. I have been Jonathan strict one and I've
been aerial casting. Business on the Brink is a production
(48:12):
of I Heart Radio and How Stuff Works. For more
podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Business on the Brink, a production from I
Heart Radio and How Stuff Works. There is no magic
potion to guarantee company success, but TSR sure seemed to
have cast a spell on gamers with its release of
Dungeons and Dragons from War to Fantasy. They mixed imaginary
(00:24):
worlds with real time tactics and strategy to create a
prize of a hobby, but consumer concern mixed with barbaric
in fighting and sneak thievery not really soon left t
S are Incorporated and Gary Gygax's Dragon find out all
about this company's epic quest on t SR on the Brain. Here, everybody,
(00:54):
I'm Jonathan Strickland and I'm Ariel Casting, and we've got
another episode that is thanks to a listener quests. Yes,
it's actually one of the first episode requests we ever got.
We've been sitting on it while we're trying to balance
out our geeky topics and are not geeky topics And
this one comes from Brandon's Stoddard, who is game guru,
super awesome guy. Yeah, we'll talk a little bit more
(01:16):
about him at the end of the episode. And uh,
as it turns out, the full story of TSR is
a really really big one because even though the company
is just a few decades old, it's gone through a
lot of changes since it first came into being in
the early, well mid seventies. Yeah, and the request is
actually for t s are uh Wizards of the Coast
(01:38):
because they do intertwine and it's very important their interactions together.
But it is such a big story, we're going to
have to break it out into two. We're focusing on
the TSR side now, and then in our next episode
we'll focus on Wizards of the Coast. Yeah, there'll be
a little bit more TSR clean up to do because
it gets crazy, y'all. So to give you a sense
(01:58):
of our own personal connection with this topic, I played
my first Dungeons and Dragons game session when I was
maybe eight or nine years old. My dad was enthusiastically
trying to teach me, and I was enthusiastically young enough
to not pay attention. But as a teenager, I became
the dungeon master for a series of games. That's the
(02:19):
person who runs the gaming sessions, and my friends would
come over every couple of weeks and we would play
D and D. And this was with the first and
second edition of the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons rule set. Yeah,
I first played D and D around years old. I
had begun with LARPing and playing magic the Gathering, which
(02:39):
actually the music director at my church UH introduced me
to UM and then I would I started playing D
and D campaigns and and other role playing games with
my LARPing friends. So let's talk about the history of this. Well.
Also for those of you who are not fully informed
on what role playing games are, we'll cover that as well.
(03:00):
So in the beginning, where do we start? All right?
So ts ARE Incorporated, which as we said, is known
for Dungeons and Dragons or D and D was started
in nineteen seventy two by Gary guy Jax and Don
kay On about a thousand dollars, and TSR stood for
Tactical Studies Rules. In fact, that was the name of it.
It wasn't shortened to TSR yet UM Brian Bloom and
(03:23):
Dave Arnisson joined into the company. Dave Arniston just for
a short period of time. He actually helped Gary guy
Jax create Dungeons and Dragons, but he wasn't brought into
the company, and shortly after Blue mounted two thousand dollars
into the company, invested into the company's startup funds, and
he eventually became CEO and his brother would also becoming
(03:44):
an early investor in the company. Yep, and uh. They
decided that they needed a company because Gary, Guy Jax,
and Arniston had together come up with a rule set
for this Dungeons and Dragons game. And they came up
with rules, but then they had to find a way
of getting that rule set out to players. Yeah. Yeah,
(04:07):
so they needed to have a business in order to
do that. It was this is pre Internet, or at
least pre public Internet, so there was no way to
reach out to people directly. Yeah, and and Artison wasn't
much of a business guy, so that's why it fell
to guy X and K. So this, by the way,
it would be one of the very first role playing games.
(04:29):
In fact, arguably you could say this was the first
role playing game, and it grew out of the war
gaming hobby. And in war gaming, players control anything from
huge armies to small squadrons in tactical battles. Typically they're
using miniatures and little manature settings to represent you know, battlegrounds,
and they might use stuff like dice to help determine outcomes.
(04:51):
The difference here is that Dungeons and Dragons would put
players in charge of controlling just a single character, not
a squad, not in army, not a battalion, and ideally
you would flesh that character out so that the character
has his or her own personality, goals, motivations, et cetera. Now,
the person running the game would have multiple characters they
(05:12):
were playing or n PCs. In four, uh, the company
came out with their first limited run of the game,
a thousand copies. They were all hand assembled, and they
all sold out. Yeah, yeah, it was. It was rapidly
seen as something that gamers were actually eager to try out. Yeah.
And then in five they changed the company's name to
TSR Hobbies, which, honestly, I think it's better to shorten
(05:35):
it down from tactical studies rules. Personally, after k passed
away and his share of these company passed to his
wife Um, in March of that year, Guy GaX sort
a letter to another game designer and said, quote, we
will never allow TSR to become a company which is
run by any outside group. That is, we may take
others in as partners. Eventually, but we'll never seek any
(05:57):
non war gamer capitalization. Uh. But to do this, they
needed a better structure to their company, and they didn't
really have it. They were just working as a partnership. Yeah,
so it was very loosey goosey, like they were kind
of creating stuff on demand, and they didn't really have
a good, uh foundation to work from. So Guy GaX
(06:20):
and Bloom incorporated TSR Hobbies, you know, officially became TSR
Hobbies Incorporated. Initially, they did it as an organization to
handle mail orders of the game's rules, and then they
were also looking at the possibility of opening up an
actual physical brick and mortar style store in Wisconsin. But
then they decided, let's repurpose this company and we're going
(06:41):
to use it to buy out the assets of the partnership.
In other words, to actually buy the intellectual property that
this partnership owned, and that would free up Donna Kay,
that was Kay's wife. She had been working with the
company but for no salary. In fact, no one had
a salary because they weren't getting enough rev new regularly
to pay salaries. And she wasn't really interested in working
(07:05):
for a company that couldn't afford to pay, and this
gave them the opportunity to to buy her out and
to formalize the corporate structure. That must have been a
relief for her. Yeah, yeah. And it was at this
stage that Bloom and guy GaX would receive shares in
this new incorporated organization. It was privately held, so these
aren't public shares, they're just it's it's stuck in the company. Yes,
(07:29):
to show the the extent of ownership of each party,
each investor in the company, Guy GaX was awarded one
hundred fifty shares, Bloom got one hundred, but then Melvin Bloom,
the father of the Bloom Boys, he would purchase two
hundred shares at one hundred dollars apiece. Brian purchased an
(07:49):
additional one hundred forty shares at that same price. So
while the initial shares to guy GaX and Bloom were
awarded based on their work in the partnership, like how
much time and effort and the initial investment they had
put into it, uh, the additional shares that were issued
would represent a thirty four thousand dollar investment from the
(08:11):
Bloom family, So the Blooms would own four hundred forty
shares collectively, Guy GaX only had one fifty, so he
became a minority shareholder in the company, but he would
still remain the president of that company. I'm honestly kind
of surprised that he let them do that. It was
probably not so much letting as a necessity, because again
(08:33):
that's where the investment money was coming from. But as
we will see, this would become the seed of a
much bigger problem later on. At this point in time,
things seem to be going pretty well for TFR hobbies.
Runs of the game continue to sell out by the thousands.
So they'd released a couple of thousand, then a few
more thousand, and then five thousand at a time, and
(08:54):
they'd all sell out, and then all that while they
were also creating new campaigns for the game, new uplements,
new modules, and releasing all of these new additions to
the game. So you buy your core Dungeons and Dragons game,
and then you buy all these additional adventures and classes
and things and rules that you can integrate, a trend
(09:14):
that continues to this day and ends up becoming the
lamentation of many a gamer. But you see, I love it.
I mean I I ended up collecting a lot of
them too, And if you were to put together, for example,
all of my A, D and D second addition stuff
in one place, you're probably looking around five six hundred
dollars worth of supplements total. I think I was more
(09:35):
of a third fourth edition girl myself, although I have
played original modules. Um So, around nine six, their revenues
were somewhere in the range of three hundred thousand dollars,
and they started subcontracting out their printing an assembly to
meet the demand that they were getting for this game.
(09:56):
And at this time they were finally able to pay
salaries to at least Gary guy GaX and Brian Bloom. Yeah. Now,
also in nineteen seventy six, Brian Bloom would ask his
brother Kevin to help the company manage corporate finances, and
Kevin initially served as the controller and treasurer for TSR Hobbies.
In he would join Brian and Gary to become one
(10:18):
of the three members of the board of directors. More
on that later too. Now, between nineteen seventy five and
nineteen seventy seven, Gary guy GaX and Brian Bloom had
opportunities to purchase up to seven hundred more shares as
the company grew, and this was at that same price
of one hundred dollars per share, and that would remain
the same no matter how big the company grew. They
(10:41):
had that option to purchase seven hundred more shares, but
would always be at that one hundred dollars even if
the shares were valued higher than that. At that point,
uh gradually guy GaX would own about a third of
the company. Brian would always maintain a slight lead of
a hundred shares over guy GaX for most of TSR
Hobbies existence. That would change a little bit later. Melvin
(11:04):
the father would not purchase more shares, so he actually
got left behind as the both Gary guy GaX and
Brian Bloom began to exercise these options, and gradually the
Bloom family's ownership of the company would drop below ownership,
so they would no longer have controlling interest in the company.
At that point, in fact, no party would own controlling interest.
(11:27):
No one had or more of the ownership, and that
also will become important later on. So in ninety seven,
the game was actually divided out into two games, a
basic version of D and D and Advanced D and D.
The basic version came with dice and from what I understand,
it was prepackaged modules and pregenerated characters and things like that. Well, yeah,
(11:48):
and you also had very limited character classes. For example,
Elf was a class. Yeah, you could, you could play
an Elf, and that was what it wasn't just your
your character's race, it's what they were like, it's their occupation. Yeah.
And the advance version had a Monster manual with more monsters, classes,
racist things like that that came with it, um and
(12:08):
you could play them or play with them, or fight
them or fight them. Yeah, it all depended on the scenario.
And like obviously, some game masters would buy these pre
made modules, sometimes not even making any changes to them.
Sometimes they would change them dramatically. And some people like
me would design their own adventures but use the rules
(12:30):
to define, you know, how those adventures actually work. Yeah.
And then in they actually got their brick and mortar,
they moved out of Gary Gygax's basement into a space
above a hobby shop in Lake Genevo, Wisconsin. So now
we get to nineteen seventy nine, and this is an
event that could have been a make or break moment
(12:52):
for a young company and involved the mysterious disappearance of
a college student and a private investigators hunch that face
the blame squarely on a little known game called Dungeons
and Dragons. Will explain more in just a second, but
first let's take a quick break. Okay, So, at Michigan
(13:13):
State University there was a student named James Dallas Egbert
the third and he went missing, and it became a
really big story. The family hired on a private eye
to investigate this disappearance, and he found out that Egbert,
like some of the other college students in the area,
had played a game called Dungeons and Dragons. The investigator theorized,
(13:34):
apparently with no actual evidence, that the game had somehow
triggered a psychosis with an Egbert, and that he was
most likely wandering through the steam tunnels beneath his college's campus,
slaying imaginary monsters and questing for treasure. This, by the way,
became the plot of a Tom Hanks movie in the
early eighties, What's the name of Mazes and Monsters? I
(13:56):
think it's It's I forget it was. It was like
a made for TV movie. It is, by the way,
absolutely terrible and sometimes terrible in the most wonderful ways.
It seems like an it seems like it would be
uh a dicey at best movie. But it also seems
like this, this theory that the investor came up with
(14:17):
is just very far fetched. Yeah, no, there was. It
was largely based on a deep misunderstanding of what a
role playing game is. There also had been reports there
were students on campus who would do the equivalent of
LARPing live action role playing, and so it was kind
of a leap to go from oh, these are people
who are playing out pretend roles and having these adventures
(14:42):
to these are people who believe themselves to be these
pretend roles. I mean as a as a LARPer currently. Sorry,
people who that's too geeky for it's just like they
just lost all respect for you. Yeah. Yeah, Well I'm
also an actor. So it's a fun improv exercise at
the very least, um, at least I don't and the
(15:05):
friends that I play with don't believe they're actually these characters.
It's um, it's make believe. It's a fairy tale. It
also has to do with the fact that it's a
game that involves magic, and so this was right at
the very cusp of the Satanic Panic in the United States,
And so this got a lot of coverage, right, Yeah, absolutely,
the media really focused on this story. I mean it
(15:25):
already is the disappearance of a student, which is it's
that's enough to be a big story in itself. Then
you had this potential connection to this obscure game that
deals with demons and monsters and magic and wizards and
sorcerers and things like that that put D and D
in a larger spotlight. Uh, And it would be the
(15:45):
beginning of a long trend in which people would associate
D and D with psychosis or cults or witchcraft and Satanism.
And like I said, the Satanic Panic, which was a
larger trend. It wasn't just about role playing games. I
mean this involved like rock and roll, music, TV movies,
all these kind of all these different things. People were thinking, oh,
this is a manifestation of a growing cult of Satanists
(16:08):
in the United States who have these very wicked plans
for people, and we have to be on the lookout
because they are out for our immortal souls. And uh, yeah,
this was a this was a huge thing. Like I
grew up in this era, so for me like, I'm like,
this is also the age of things like chick tracks
that would come out about Dungeons and Dragons and about
(16:29):
how it would convince people to do terrible things. Uh
so what was the result of all this? Well, you know,
I think the desired was a result was to get
people to stop playing D and D, stop watching these movies,
these TV shows, things like that. But actually it kind
of got this taboo cult following. People are like, what
is this game that nobody wants me to play? And
(16:51):
so it boosted their sales. It actually ended up being
some of the best marketing that they could look for. Yeah,
and as for Egbert, he actually called up the investor
to Gator. Uh turns out he went to New Orleans. Um,
and there's a lot more sad stuff about that story,
but none of it actually connects to Dungeons and Dragons.
And that's a different story for a different podcasts. Yeah
(17:13):
it is. I mean, if you're interested in hearing about it,
it is very sad. It does not have a happy ending.
But as as Ariel just said, it really doesn't have
anything to do with the rest of our our podcast.
So rather than go down that rabbit hole, we'll we'll
go back to talking about TSR now. One of the
things that makes it hard to talk about TSRs early
days is because they were a private company. Uh, and
(17:35):
as a private company, they were not required to file
detailed financial reports the way public companies have to every year.
They essentially we're just supposed to report things like revenues
and costs so that you know, the I R S
knows how much how much taxes they get from the corporation.
But uh, the company claimed to have made around two
(17:55):
million dollars in sales revenue in nineteen seventy nine. That's
not too shabby considering they started on like somewhere around
one to three thousand dollars. Yeah, it was. It was
also an indication that this was a hobby on the rise,
but that also would cause problems. Yes, but it wasn't
just a hobby on the rise in the States. It
(18:17):
was also getting international appeals. So in nineteen eighty they
started an LTD in the UK to support their international demand.
Also in nineteen eighty, a magazine called inc I n
C Incorporated not not I n K, the tattoo magazine.
Yeah yeah, named ts are one of the top ten
most profitable privately held companies. They've actually got a bunch
(18:38):
of articles on it, and that's because TSR had simited
statements saying that they were making sixty million dollars in
sales or so, which is not bad. Yeah, it means
that from nineteen seventy nine to nineteen eighty they would
have had eight times the amount of sales revenue. That's
an enormous amount of growth. It's like five percent owth
(19:01):
And you might say, well, that's incredible, and it might
be a little too incredible. The wise Wall Street Journal
would actually report in nineteen eighty three that those sales
figures for nineteen eighty were likely closer to eight points
seven million dollars. It's still that's but that's you know,
to go from uh, sixteen to eight that's a she
(19:22):
reduced it by half, so but still a pretty incredible
number from to go from two million to eight point
all no, no, but it does make you question why
the heck is there such a huge discrepancy to go
from sixteen million to eight point seven million. Now it's
possible that it was all just honest mistakes. I mean,
TSR was kind of it was still not really a
(19:44):
rigid corporate structure. Kevin Bloom was not, like the the
best accountant for that kind of job. I mean, this
was something beyond what he had really worked toward before.
So not not saying he was bad, but rather that
he was ill suited for it. Yeah, Guy GaX wasn't
much better. No, Guy GaX was a high school dropout
(20:07):
and a game designer, and and so you had people
who were very passionate about what they were doing, but
they weren't They weren't business minded there. This actually caused problems.
I read in the company there was a module that
was written for the game called The Princess and the
Silver Castle or something like that, and it was actually
the I think the Castle of the Silver Princess. So yeah,
(20:28):
and it kind of they had a game developer write it.
She said, don't let them touch my writing. The owners
didn't really look at it. It went to the game developers.
They put a bunch of in jokes about how the
company was being run and their dissatisfaction into it. And
by the time it made it to print, it didn't
make it to stores, but it made it to print.
(20:48):
And then finally the owner saw it and we're like, no,
we can't, you can't publish this, And it did make
it to some stores, but it was there for all
of one day. On the day that it came out,
it was recalled old and so all the stores were
told to ship back their copies. A few got out
into the wild. Uh. The there are two versions of
this module. There's one that has an orange cover that's
(21:10):
the original version that got scrapped after it initially came out,
and then there's a green version that was completely rewritten.
At A large part of the problem was not just
those in jokes, but art that was let's say, probably
not entirely appropriate for the the intended audience exactly, especially
(21:32):
not in this era of moral panic. Really, what I'm
going to say is if they had had a better
company structure and some R and D, maybe it wouldn't
have even made it two stores or to print um in.
They licensed Dungeons and Dragons to Mattel to make an
electronic version of the game, and it sold out months
before Christmas, which, as we all know, is the biggest
toy and game season and TSR they didn't have to
(21:56):
worry about supply. They just had to collect the royalties
from it. Yep, it was not a not a bad deal,
not not a bad position to be in. Yeah. So
now at this stage they realized they were gonna have
to scale up because the demand was growing. Obviously, even
if you look at the eight point seven million instead
of sixteen million dollars in sales, that's a lot of demand.
(22:19):
So this was not actually easy or well documented at
the time, largely because neither Gary Gygax nor Brian Bloom
had any business management experience or knowledge. Uh. And according
to an article written by John Peterson. This is an
excellent article, by the way, it goes into very deep
detail about what was happening at this time. It's called
the Ambush at Sheridan's Springs. It's published in Medium. I
(22:43):
highly recommend you read this whole article. A lot of
the information I pulled for this episode comes from that article.
But according to him, financial reports from this time period
were at best sporadic and not necessarily accurate. So you
weren't getting frequent financial reports, and when you did get them,
you couldn't be sure that they were reflective of reality. Yeah.
(23:05):
And this was actually made even more difficult because there
were structural changes in the corporation, including one where they
changed when the company's fiscal year began, so in one
they had a fiscal here that was only nine months long. Yeah, yeah,
that does make things much more complicated because also that
that looks like that's a huge impact on sales, right,
if you only have nine months of sales instead of
(23:26):
a full twelve months, then it will suddenly look like
you weren't on your projected path for growth, right, because
but you have to keep in mind, well, that's because
I have fewer months in the year because of the
way we changed our structure. Also, in nineteen eighty one,
Melvin Bloom would transfer his two hundred shares to his
son Kevin, And at that point Kevin Bloom owned around
(23:46):
two hundred five shares including the ones from Melvin, so
he had only had five to start with. And this
was a move that raised some eyebrows actually because it
was thought that it was in violation of the shareholder
agreement that you know, maybe this was against the by
laws of the company, but they went ahead and did
it anyway, and nobody put up enough stink to stop
(24:08):
it. It It was was say, knowing their management capabilities, it's
possible that even if it were in the by laws,
they were giant loopholes they could have gotten away with it.
I haven't read them, so I'm not certain, but it
doesn't seem unplausible. Two, they started translating their games into
other languages, a whole bunch of them, including Finnish, which
(24:29):
is awesome because I like Finland. Um I don't like
it when things are written and finished, because I didn't
even get started, oh chom and And they were still growing.
So this, you know, as we said, this moral panic
wasn't affecting them. Despite their organizational issues. They were still growing.
(24:49):
And part of the reason for that, it's because adventure
games and electronic games both were really getting prominence in
the market. Board games and card games and things like that.
We're taking slight decline, it's just the way the cycle was.
Cycle was going and technology was advancing. Like you could
you could argue that right now we're in sort of
(25:09):
maybe in the tail end of a board game renaissance.
But we saw over the last few years board games
kind of increased in popularity, I think largely because you
started to see people who wanted to find reasons to
hang out with each other in the same space at
the santis opposed to just on Facebook or Instagram. Um.
But another part of their success was that they didn't
really have competition at this point in the role playing
(25:32):
game realm uh, largely due to the fact that, I mean,
they had war games, but they weren't really the same thing,
and other other people who might want to compete with
Dungeons and Dragons. And there's a lot of role playing
games out there now, lord knows, I've played more than
I can count on both hands. Um. But they had
to write rules that people would want to learn and play.
(25:54):
So once you already learned the rules for Dungeons and Dragons,
which were are were and are a little complicated, a
fifth edition makes it a little easier, especially compared to three.
Especially compared to three oh man three you need to spreadsheet.
But um, so it was hard for other other companies
and other people who wrote games to really get in
there and get a market share because people already learned
(26:16):
Dungeons and Dragons. They don't want to invest the time
to learn something new. Yeah. Also, TSR would release a
few other games, uh, not just Dungeons and Dragons. They
were behind a Marvel role playing game as well, so
they would release other role playing games in other realms,
and and they weren't based on the same rule set either,
so that you know, TSR was not really in direct
(26:38):
competition with itself because it was making games that were
for different interests like superheroes versus fantasy. So but they
made sure to diversify a little bit in that realm. Well,
I mean, also, if if I know I like the
way Dungeons and Dragons plays and has written, I'm going
to probably trust that company more for another game. Also,
(26:59):
their manufact acturing costs were low, their overhead was low.
They were able to make product to meet demand as
opposed to having a whole bunch of supply and hoping
people wanted it. They also had a line of credit,
but it never really that that part of it, at
least initially didn't affect them. They were pretty wise on
their spending at that point. Yeah, that would change. So
(27:21):
continuing this running theme of corporate governance confusion where some
conflicting reports on how the company was actually being run.
Doug Bloom can you can you guess who Doug Bloom
was related to? Um Ronald McDonald, no, Brian Kevin and
Melvin Doug Bloom wrote an article for a magazine called
(27:42):
Random Events, which I feel like could describe my life.
But the article said that the president's office was held
by three people that would be Guy GaX and Brian
and Kevin Bloom, and that all decisions were made unanimously.
They had to be a unanimous decision in order to
move forward. If there was disagreement, they could not move forward.
(28:03):
Guy GaX later disputed that description and said that he
had ultimate authority for executive level decisions as president. Board
level decisions were still done unanimously, but anything executive level
in the company. What he said ultimately fell to him
that Brian Bloom was senior executive officer and Kevin Bloom
was the chief operating officer. So then, to make things
(28:28):
more confusing, the company had a reorganization. So in uh
it became known as the Year of three Presidents because
Gary Gygax became president of TSR Hobbies Incorporated, Brian Bloom
would become president of TSR Fun Group, I know, I
kind of which I would be part of a fund group,
(28:49):
and then Kevin Bloom became president of TSR Service Group.
And as you can imagine that didn't clear up things
for anyone. Yeah. So despite all that confusion, the company
was still doing really good business, and they acquired another
gaming company called Simulations Publications, Incorporated. And they also published
(29:10):
a classic pulp fiction magazine called Amazing Stories, which Steven
Spielberg did a TV series based on THEI I think
they're re launching that. Yeah, I believe. We talked about
that in a in an episode of a different show
we used to do. Yeah. Now, based on this booming business,
they you know, they had every reason at that point,
(29:31):
or at least they thought they had every reason to
believe that things were just on the up and up
and going to continue to rise. TSR valued each share
of the company at three thousand dollars. These would be
the same shares that previously had been valued at one
and you could still, if you were guy Gas or
Bloom by one of those seven hundred shares for a
hundred dollars a piece, even though it was now valued
(29:52):
at three thousand dollars otherwise, and again a privately held company,
with most of the shares being hold held by those
three executives. In three they changed their name just to
TSR Incorporated, So they took the hobbies out and they
added a fourth division and entertainment division called Dungeons and
Dragons Entertainment, and Gary guy Yax was sent uh. Jonathan
(30:16):
has in the notes here some might say exiled. I
read conflicting things. Some people are like, oh, he chose
to go. Some people said he was sent, some people
said he was kicked out. He was sent to Hollywood
to develop uh this division as the president of the division.
And that's where we got the D and D cartoon. Yeah.
By the way, if you search online, have you seen
(30:37):
this commercial that I'm referencing on this I haven't have
seen the cartoon. It's amazing. So there's a commercial. Renault
at released a car commercial in Brazil. So it's it's
Brazilian car commercial that features live actors and as you
watch it you realize they are they are the characters
from the dn D cartoon and even the Dungeon Master
(30:57):
makes an appearance in the commercial. It is pretty amazing.
I'm going to have to check that out. Now. Going
to Hollywood meant that Guy GaX had to leave the
day to day operations of TSR to Kevin and Brian Bloom,
who you know. They had controlling stock of the company. Um,
and they we're happy with that. They thought that they
(31:19):
could do a much better job than Gary was doing. Yeah,
they felt that Guy GaX was being far too conservative
and trouble was a ruin because while they were doing
all this, sales of the games were actually on the decline.
The projected revenue for two was forty five million dollars,
but when it was all said and done, the company
only managed about half of that projected amount, and it's
(31:43):
because the market was contracting. It's the same sort of
issue we've talked about with other things, where you reach
market penetration and market saturation, where the market it's now
you've got as much of the product out there as
people want, and you can't you can't just keep putting
the same stuff out because everyone who that it already
bought one. And even if you're coming up with all
these modules and additional adventures, people have to play through
(32:05):
the first ones before they want to go out and
buy new. Yeah, so you either you either have to
revise everything or you have to come up with something
really innovative to drive more sales. But at the time
TSR was starting to find out that it's bread and
Butter was getting a little stale. Yeah, and with that
that little uh C s, I like, yeah, moment, I
(32:30):
think we can take a little break. I need one, Okay,
all right. So while Gary was in California to secure
the whole cartoon thing. Um. And by the way, he
did get Orson Welles to agree to start in a
D and D movie. I don't I don't think that
came to. The only d D movie I could think
(32:50):
of was the really Bad One. Yeah, although Joe mangian Nello, yeah,
he wants to do one, wants to do and he's
a big dn D fan. Um. And while he was
out there, he got word that Kevin and Brian Bloom
were making a real big mess of the company. Yeah,
so they missed those revenue goals that I talked about
(33:11):
and they had to write off the acquisition of a
needlework company. They they had decided that they were going
to diversify and one of the things they bought was
a needlework company because they were actually making money off
of it initially. So like just our our projects that say,
there's no dungeon like home kind of yeah, sort of
like yeah, it's like if if you if you don't
want to play a paladin, you can do some needlework.
(33:34):
But yeah, it turned out that that initial success wasn't
something that was on a projected like the projected path
was not accurate to what was actually happening, so they
had to write off that acquisition. They also had to
secure a four million dollar loan with the American National Bank,
and Kevin Bloom headed up that effort. He would later say, quote,
(33:56):
I was the best there was in the company, but
I wasn't the right person into quote. So there's some
more foreshadowing, and that's this problem where they needed the cash,
they didn't have it on hand. Uh, and ultimately the
deal was probably not the best one for the company.
TSRs creditors also placed a demand on the company to
bring on three outside financial experts to join the board
(34:19):
of directors, which at that time we're still just Gary
guy GaX and Brian and Kevin Bloom. So the Blooms
got to choose because guy GaX was out in California.
So the Blooms chose three new members from the Wisconsin
area of businesses, and those three had no idea about
the games industry. They essentially always voted along with the Blooms,
(34:42):
so it really just added to the Blooms voting power
in the board of directors. It's almost like they planned
it that way. Almost almost Well, Gary comes back. TSR
is suffering from poor sales, are over a million dollars
in debt there on the edge of insolvency. Um me
on these these kind of shifty decisions that the brothers
(35:04):
are making and changes that they're making. They were doing
some weird stuff, like apparently TSR had around seventy company cars.
I've read one report that they were spending company money
to like dredge up a shipwreck or something like that.
They had too much inventory, they were overstaffed. It sounded
a lot like some of the more extravagant expenses you
(35:25):
would hear about during the Internet startup days, where you
would have these dot com companies that would get huge
amounts of investment up front, and then they would blow
all that money on these lavish offices and crazy parties
and have very little to show for it afterwards. That's
kind of what it sounded like, but even though they
were actually still producing games. Yeah, it does sound that way,
(35:47):
but they're still producing games, but the demand is just
not there as much. Yeah, yeah, and so this obviously
is a situation that you can't have go on indefinitely.
So the possibility of outside investors coming in and taking
a majority share in the company arose. Uh. The This
was again against Gary Gygax's wishes, but the rest of
(36:10):
the board wanted it to happen. However, while it initially
looked like it could happen, the company later said it
would undergo a financial restructuring process without outside resources. So
why did this change? Why did it go from the
company is going to bring in outside investors, they're going
to get a majority share or at least a large
share of the company. Why did that change? Well, it's
(36:33):
because that's when guy GaX decided to really jump in.
He exercised his options to get Yeah, he did level up,
he pinged, he got he got his additional shares. He
he exercised that option. So he bought more shares in
the company, and his son Ernie owned shares of the company,
and together their collective shares represented fifty one point one
(36:57):
percent of the total ownership of TSAR. Arrow margin of
control that it's enough for controlling interest. So because he
had control of the company, he could override the other
board members decisions, and he said, let's not do this deal.
And Uh, the way I wrote it in my notes
(37:18):
is that he passed his saving throw and mixed it.
So the company downsized. They reduced their head count down
to nine employees. They had been building steadily at that point.
They at one point, they're up to a hundred and thirty. Yeah,
probably more before this. So they came to the realization
that there projections were not based in reality. That they
(37:41):
were they were based on a fad, not a sustainable trend.
They had made these fictional projections before and it seemed
to go decently well. So yeah, just that game didn't
continue and definitely so by this time, the Blooms would
no longer hold operational positions. Essentially, Guy GaX was like,
all right, it's time for you guys to step down.
(38:02):
But they still owned a large number of shares in
the company, so they remained on the board of directors
for a time. Yes, So with the Blooms out, Gary
really needed somebody else to help manage the company, so
he brought in Lorraine Williams in as a manager to
help a financial stabilization. Uh, Jonathan, you have a note
(38:22):
here that Williams's grandfather wrote some comic books. Yes, the
original publisher of the Buck Rogers comic books. So the
reason why I put that in there is because Williams
came from money. She she already had a pretty substantial
amount of money at her disposal, and that's partly why
(38:42):
Gary Gygax wanted her involvement, because she could invest in
the company and helped give it some much needed financial support,
but also because he had worked with her brother in
Los Angeles. Her brother was in the entertainments industry, and
Gary had encountered him while working to get the D
and D cartoon up and running. And you know, it
(39:03):
seemed like it was working, but that was just a
face value value because Lorraine had had planned out a
little bit of a sabotage. I don't know if she
mentioned as a sabotage, but she certainly did some stuff
in in in the Shadows of Business. Yeah, here's where
we get to the table. Here's where we get to
the real brink for TSR. And for Gary Gygax in particular.
(39:25):
And so pay attention because this is an interesting series
of events, or an unfortunate series of events of you.
So the Blooms wanted out. They were no longer in
executive level positions, but they didn't want to get out
without being fully compensated for the shares they had in
their possession. They had an idea of what the valuation
(39:49):
was for those shares, and they presented that to Gary Gygax.
Uh First of all, they the company looked at potentially
getting a loan for creditors to pay off this amount.
But the creditors took a look at the amount that
the Blooms were asking for and they said, no, your
company is not worth that. We're not going to give
(40:09):
you a loan for a buy back purpose. You can't
do it this way. So then guy GaX was thinking
about maybe using his own money, but the Blooms price
was too high. So there was this back and forth
going on. But then you had Williams there, and so
Williams and the Blooms met behind closed doors and they
met in advance of a big board meeting, and they
(40:30):
concocted an idea. So Williams will put out a down
payment of seventy thousand dollars to the Blooms. That was
enough for their seven hundred shares that they could execute on,
and with three hundred shares of her own and with
the collection of the Blooms shares of stock, she became
the majority shareholder for TSR. Guy GaX. His shares fell
(40:54):
below fift because the number that had been in circulation
at that point Williams had attracted enough of them, and
she and Gary guy GaX, while they had started off
as as being very friendly to one another when they
were working together, Williams became disenchanted with him pretty quickly.
So do you think that might have been impart due
(41:15):
to the Blooms influence? Possibly? I think it's also because
guy GaX himself was pretty conservative with his decisions. He
wanted to focus more on the game's approach. Uh. He
was not as gung ho on the diversification side. He
did plan on not writing everything himself. He wasn't he
had already retired from that perspective of the of the business.
(41:38):
But he didn't want to do some of the big
moves that the Blooms and Williams wanted to do. So
she put the screws to him essentially, and the board
of directors with Williams as the kind of the motivating
factor forced Guy GaX out of the company. That's unfortunate. Yeah,
(42:01):
he actually tried to once he found all this out,
he tried to sue UM the sale of the stock
shares and sue against it and keep it from happening.
And he lost that fight. Uh. You know, Lorraine was CEO.
They shelved a bunch of projects that Gary was currently
working on UM. Not all of them, but a lot
of them. I'm guessing that Orson Wells movie was one
(42:22):
of them, probably probably. Yeah, And she did all this
in six months. Yeah. She had joined the company six
months previously and at this point was now going to
run the company. Yeah. Well, Gary resigned, He sold his
remaining shares in the company and he and and doing that,
he lost the rights to a lot of the things
that he had written and created UM. In an interview
(42:43):
with Wired magazine before he passed away, because he passed
away in two thousand eight UM, he said that he
was fed up and ready to leave at that point anyhow,
he was just done with it UM. And over the
next ten years, Gary would go on to do other
gaming things and there would be legal battles between him
and t s Are over his new projects and the
(43:04):
intellectual property that belonged to D and D and ts ARE.
So that's really unfortunate. Now the company was dealing with
the fallout for this battle for control at the executive level,
as well as with other outside factors, and while ts
Are survived being on the brink of catastrophe for the
time being, it was able to to stay solvent at
(43:27):
that time. It would turn out that another existential crisis
was just a few years away, and we'll cover that
one in the subsequent episode where we introduced Wizards of
the Coast, But at the time they had weathered a
pretty dramatic storm. Like ousting the founder of a company
(43:47):
is a big, big deal, it is. It seems to
me that Gary would have been a lot better off
if if demand for his game had been smaller, if
he had been, to say, stay a small, hobbyist, cobbyist company.
I mean, I'm personally glad that it grew much larger,
(44:07):
or else I may never you know, played these games,
which are an awful lot of fun. Well, and I
think that the rise of Dungeons and Dragons gave way
to trends in mainstream entertainment that we're seeing today, things
like I don't know that we would have the Marvel
Cinematic Universe as it stands today without some of the
(44:30):
ground the groundwork that was laid by stuff like Dungeons
and Dragons, which which kind of introduced more fantastical elements
in entertainment. And like Tolkien had written the Lord of
the Rings trilogy and The Hobbit and all that and
all these other books, but I'm guessing D and D
probably helped encourage movie makers to make those stories into movies. Yeah,
(44:51):
and obviously you've seen lots of other fantasy films that
that definitely uh owe a lot to D n D. Now,
I would say that the lesson to learn here, and
it's one that Ariel and I are very familiar with,
is that when you get a bunch of creative types
together and they have great ideas for a business, whether
it's games or it's theater or some other creative endeavor,
(45:15):
that's fantastic. You definitely need those people, but you also
really need people who know their stuff in business. That
if they had those business minded individuals who had a
deeper understanding of corporate structure and governance so that the
company could perform as a company in a responsible and
accountable way, then perhaps it would not have encountered these
(45:40):
kind of challenges. But Ariel and I have both been
part of groups that were full of creative individuals and
lots of you know, well meaning intention but that were
if not if not if they didn't fail, they struggled
to succeed because we didn't have that business oriented person
(46:02):
there to to say, like, your ideas are great, but
it's my job to tell you which ones are realistic,
which ones aren't. What it's going to take for us
to achieve your vision, that kind of thing. Yeah, that
is that is true. Um, well, I'm really excited to
get into the next episode. Um because it's the struggles
(46:24):
was not over for Dungeons and Dragons at this point,
but no, we're running short on time. Yeah, they the
next the next brink moment would be the part where
Wizards of the Coast come in, and that would not
be the last brink momentum. And of course not all
brink moments are on the brink of disasters. Sometimes are
on the brink of success, stratospheric success. So in our
(46:45):
next episode we will cover that, uh, that module in
the series, the campaign of Dudgeons and Dragons to continue
using the parlance. But before we do that, you wanted
to mention some stuff about our our listener requests. Yeah. So,
as I said, Brandis Stodard requested this TSR Wizards of
the Coast topic. UM. And I know Brandis because I
(47:08):
actually played a larp that he wrote. UM. So he
does freelance game design in writing UM. But he also
does a lot of blogging about gameplay and game theory
and things like that. So we talked a lot about
the business side of of TSR and Dungeons and Dragons,
and he writes about more than just Dungeons and Dragons.
But if you want to explore that side of gaming,
I suggest you check him out on Twitter. He is
(47:30):
at Brandis Stoddard that's b R A N D E
S S t O D D A R d UM
and you can also visit his website that is www
dot brandon starter dot com and check out some of
the gameplay stuff that he's written. Now, if people want
to reach out like Brandis did and ask us to
cover something, what email address should they use, Well, they
(47:50):
can email us at Feedback at the Brink podcast dot show.
And if you want to check out more information about
us and look at the archive of all our our
past episode. Le's go to our website. That's the Rink,
a podcast dot show. You'll find all that there. Until
next time. I have been Jonathan strict one and I've
been aerial casting. Business on the Brink is a production
(48:12):
of I Heart Radio and How Stuff Works. For more
podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Business on the Brink News
Hosts And Creators
Jonathan Strickland
Ariel Kristen Kasten
Show Links
AboutPopular Podcasts
United States of Kennedy
United States of Kennedy is a podcast about our cultural fascination with the Kennedy dynasty. Every week, hosts Lyra Smith and George Civeris go into one aspect of the Kennedy story.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com