I was a huge fan of Jon Peterson’s earlier book Playing at the World (Unreason Press, 2012) when I read it back in either 2014 or 2015 – I was finishing my PhD and records from that time are hazy at best. I managed to sneak it into my thesis, so I must have read it before August 2015. I also really enjoyed Dungeons and Dragons Art and Arcana (Ten Speed Press, 2018), which Peterson contributed to. Given this pedigree of past works, I was very excited when I discovered that he was revisiting the subject of the early history of Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) in his new book, and I’m happy to report that it did not disappoint.
Where Playing at the World was a history of the mechanics of Dungeons and Dragons – a book that worked backwards from the first edition to explain the origin of the many ideas that converged to form the first roleplaying game – Game Wizards is a book about the people and companies that published Dungeons and Dragons and the drama that marked the game’s first decade. The narrative in Game Wizards reads like it would make an excellent subject for prestige television, with larger-than-life characters, petty feuds, a rise to riches and glory, and a dramatic collapse of friendships and finances. By the books end both of D&Ds creators had lost control of the game that made them famous, and it’s a rollercoaster of a journey to get there.
There probably isn’t enough in Game Wizards for someone with no interest in D&D or the history of roleplaying games. It does include some interesting discussion of the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, although I was a little disappointed to see that the notorious Chick Tracts didn’t get a mention, if only because I would have liked someone to explain to me how something so bizarre fits into the broader backlash against D&D. That aside, the focus of the book is very much on the development of TSR, the publisher of D&D, as a business, its meteoric rise, and its catastrophic years in the mid-1980s that eventually lead to the takeover of the company by outside parties. It’s a tale full of drama and a truly shocking amount of pettiness exercised by men in their mid-30s and early-40s. That means it won’t necessarily be for everyone – if you don’t know who Gary Gygax or Dave Arneson you are may struggle to be invested in their brief collaboration and subsequent feuds. Then again, if you love a good story of a company growing too large too fast and rapidly going off the rails, then maybe there is enough here for you!
Peterson does an excellent job of including the different viewpoints of the principal characters in his book, no small feat given that some of them seemed to live in completely different realities from each other. The number of contradictory stories that needed to be untangled, as well as the amount of revisionism of earlier history to fit new narratives and grudges that had to be dug through, makes this an impressive piece of scholarship as well as an excellent read. It also provides a great example for how to manage an even-handed approach to a subject whose participants were prone to gross hyperbole.
Game Wizards is a book for anyone who has ever wondered about the business of D&D and how it went from a bizarre niche game to a dominant cultural force, and what happened to the people who helped make it. I would still recommend Peterson’s earlier book, Playing at the World, for people more interested in the mechanics and design of D&D rather than TSR as a business. That said, you could do far worse than buying and reading both!