TSR did what it could to prevent an all-out witch hunt. A few months after the Heber City incident, the company ran a half-page ad in The Dragon with the banner headline “Real-life Clerics: TSR Hobbies needs you.” The ad solicited players who happened to be clergy “of any organized religion” to share their stories of D&D’s “helpful, positive influence.”
But they were too late. In 1981, author Rona Jaffe published a novel inspired by the Egbert case. Mazes and Monsters told the story of Robbie Wheeling, a college student who suffers a psychotic break while playing a D&D-like game. Wheeling comes to believe he is actually his character, the cleric Pardeux, and that he must jump off one of the World Trade Center towers in order to win the game. The made-for-TV movie version, released in 1982, starred a post–Bosom Buddies Tom Hanks.
Mazes and Monsters is nonsensical, hysterical, and a woefully inaccurate depiction of Dungeons & Dragons. But for many Americans who knew little about the game, it cemented an idea that fantasy role-playing was the road to perdition. In the summer of 1982, officials in Oklahoma banned the game from school districts, citing its “satanic nature.” In 1984, when San Diego, California, police officer Kirk Johnson was shot and killed by his own son, the boy’s attorneys tried to use his obsession with Dungeons & Dragons as an explanation in an insanity defense. Later that same year, British clergymen warned that letting children play D&D was essentially handing them over to Satan: “This is indeed only a game, but it is a game of life and death!” the Reverend John Hollidge of Gold Hill Baptist Church in Buckinghamshire said in a letter to parents.
Increasingly, Dungeons & Dragons became the go-to scapegoat for teen suicides. In 1984, Bergen County, New Jersey, police blamed the deaths of two teenage brothers on D&D. “My understanding is that once you reach a certain point where you are the master, your only way out is death,” the police chief told the Bergen County Record. Later the same year, Richmond, Virginia, mother Patricia Pulling sued Gary Gygax and TSR for $10 million, claiming that her sixteen-year-old son killed himself after his character was “cursed” by another player. The suit was dismissed, but Pulling went on to form Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons, or BADD, an advocacy group that harried D&D players for years.
In 1985, the TV news magazine 60 Minutes dedicated an entire segment to the dangers of Dungeons & Dragons. Anchor Ed Bradley re-reported overly credulous police and local media reports as fact and relied heavily on an emotional interview with grieving mother Pulling. A psychologist interviewed for the segment, Dr. Thomas Radecki, was also highly critical of the game (a few years later, he was stripped of his medical license). After the broadcast, Gygax forwarded letters to Bradley from the mothers of two children cited in the report as D&D suicides; both letters said the game had nothing to do with their children’s deaths. The show never issued a retraction.
And the criticism didn’t stop. In her 1988 book Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society, co-founder of the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) and future second lady of the United States Tipper Gore railed against D&D, claiming it had been linked to “nearly fifty teenage suicides and homicides.” After the 1988 murder of Lieth Von Stein, a North Carolina business executive, police quickly arrested his twenty-year-old stepson, Chris, as well as two of his friends, and all three men were eventually convicted of scheming to collect a $2 million inheritance. But when two competing books about the case, Blood Games and Cruel Doubt, were released in 1991, both played up the fact that the friends had occasionally played D&D together.
Even the Christian pamphleteer Jack Chick piled on: In his comic-book tract Dark Dungeons, a young girl is inducted into a witches’ coven after undergoing “intense occult training through D&D.” She later learns real magic and casts a “mind bondage” spell on her father, forcing him to buy her $200 worth of D&D manuals.
D&D wasn’t the first game to get this treatment. Religious extremists have attempted to ban chess repeatedly over the ages, from the prophet Muhammad’s cousin Ali ibn Abu Talib, who ruled the Islamic caliphate in the seventh century, to the Afghan Taliban, who tried as recently as the twentieth century. But that must have provided little consolation to Gary Gygax, who received the brunt of the attacks. The former shoe repairman turned game designer was painted as some kind of satanic, child-corrupting madman and even received death threats. For a period in the early 1980s, Gygax had to employ a bodyguard.
Still, he tried not to take it personally. “I think I understood their motivations,” he told an interviewer in 2004. “Some of them were very sincere—their ignorance was sincere. The poor woman who started BADD said in her first interview in the newspaper that she hadn’t known her son was playing D&D for two years. I mean, that’s a serious failure of parenting. Clearly she was transferring blame for her own failure to a game. It was sad.”
* * *
Even during the worst of the satanic panic, D&D prospered. In 1980, TSR expanded its operations into a new office and warehouse, and launched a subsidiary company in the UK. New products included World of Greyhawk, a comprehensive guide to Gygax’s home campaign that covered everything from geography to the names of days of the week.4 A new spy-themed role-playing game called Top Secret even caused a panic all of its own: In the summer of 1980, the FBI showed up at TSR’s headquarters after a Lake Geneva resident happened across an out-of-context TSR memo describing an assassination and turned it over to the police.
In 1981, Gygax made a distribution deal with Random House, the biggest publisher in the U.S., putting the game into tens of thousands of bookstores. TSR followed up the deal with more kid-friendly products: a revision of 1977’s Basic Set, the beginner’s game that covered character levels 1 through 3; and its first follow-up, the Expert Set, covering levels 4 through 14.
D&D got so popular it even appeared in an opening scene of the 1982 blockbuster E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial—right after the universe’s most forgetful spacemen leave their long-necked buddy in the California woods. When the audience first sees the film’s human protagonist, ten-year-old Elliott, he’s trying to talk his way into his sixteen-year-old brother Michael’s Dungeons & Dragons game. Later, one of the older kids tries to explain the game to Elliott’s mom: “There’s no winning. It’s like life; you don’t win at life.”
Maybe not, but TSR seemed to be winning at business. In December 1981, Inc. magazine ranked TSR Hobbies number six on its annual list of the fastest-growing privately held companies in the United States. A February 1982 follow-up article crowed about TSR’s surging revenues—projected at $27 million for fiscal 1982—and praised its unusual management structure:
Perhaps most surprising about TSR’s management team is its lack of relevant experience. The nine top managers—three principals (Gary Gygax and brothers Brian and Kevin Blume) and six divisional vice-presidents—represent former occupations ranging from biologist to pharmacist to plumber. Of those nine, six are currently in formal management training programs, and only in the last year has the company begun to hire people with specialized business skills. The organization operates in odd ways. Despite Gary Gygax’s title of president, for instance, the company has no real chief executive. Rather it operates under the direction of a “presidential office,” composed of Gygax and Brian and Kevin Blume. The company will not open the door on any new venture without a unanimous decision from these three.
To outside observers, TSR’s unusual structure must have seemed innovative, even maverick. The truth was that the Blumes—backed up by three handpicked outside investors—had complete control. “I was pretty much boxed out of the running of the company because the [Blumes] . . . thought they could run the company better than I could,” Gygax said.
Unable to get anything done in Lake Geneva—and in the middle of a separation from his wife—Gygax packed his bags and headed for Hollywood to start a new TSR subsidiary called Dungeons & Dragons Entertainment. “He had these ideas that in the long term, TSR should expand into visual media,” says former TSR employee and Gygax adviser Fra
nk Mentzer. “These games all take place in your head, in your imagination, and if you can transcend that and get it all onto film, that could be a big breakthrough. So he headed for the coast.”
Gygax did not live the life of an exile in Los Angeles. TSR was flush with cash, so he rented a mansion on tony Summitridge Drive in Beverly Hills and played the part of Hollywood hotshot, dining with movie stars, partying with beauty queens, getting driven around in fancy cars. Before long, his expenses approached $10,000 a month—more than $20,000 in 2012 dollars. According to some accounts, he paid half a million dollars to The Lion in Winter screenwriter James Goldman to write a script for a D&D movie. (It was never produced, and all that ever really came out of TSR’s efforts in Hollywood were twenty-seven episodes of a Dungeons & Dragons Saturday-morning cartoon.)
Back in Lake Geneva, the Blumes’ management inexperience was costing the company even more. With Gygax out of the picture, TSR entered a phase of unfettered spending: In May of 1982, the company bought the long-past-its-prime pulp magazine Amazing Stories from Ultimate Publishing Company and acquired the games owned by a bankrupt competitor, Simulations Publishing Inc. That same year, it helped fund a salvage operation of the Lucius Newberry, a passenger steamship that caught fire and sank to the bottom of Lake Geneva in 1891—all they found was rusted bits of the ship’s boiler. Executives procured dozens of company cars, spent millions on unnecessary office furniture, and gave high-paying jobs to relatives.
In 1983, TSR acquired several new toy and gift businesses, including Greenfield Needlewomen, a maker of needlepoint project kits; it was purchased, according to employees, to provide Kevin’s wife with a hobby. D&D-branded cross-stitch patterns joined an ever-expanding list of merchandise that included Halloween costumes, wood-burning sets, wallets, flashlights, bubble blowers, flying disks, and the Official Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Cool, Cool Candles.
TSR execs even considered going into the railroad business. “There was a proposal that the company purchase the railroad line between Lake Geneva and Chicago,” recalls author and designer Tracy Hickman. “The argument went that by owning the railroad line, we would have our own railhead for product shipment, and at the same time we could run D&D game trains between Chicago and Lake Geneva. Even in the game-design department, we’d see proposals like this being considered by management and just shake our heads.”
The mismanagement extended beyond overspending. At one point, Kevin Blume read a report about the amount of drug use in a typical American workplace and decided he’d tolerate no such behavior at TSR. “He got all worked up about that and wanted to go around and do surprise inspections, shining a little flashlight in employees’ eyes to see if their pupils would dilate,” says Frank Mentzer. “He got talked out of it by saner heads.”
Despite troubles at the top, TSR still managed to put out some great game products. In 1983, the company released the third major revision of the Basic Set rules, this time edited by Frank Mentzer. Packaged in a distinctive red box with a cover illustration by fantasy artist Larry Elmore, the “Red Box” became one of the best-known and most-loved rule sets in the game’s history. That same year, TSR published one of the game’s all-time fan-favorite adventures, the gothic horror module Ravenloft, written by Tracy Hickman and his wife, Laura.
But none of it was enough to plug the hole created by fundamental corporate mismanagement. In the summer of 1983, TSR’s financial reports showed a multimillion-dollar loss, and the company cut 15 percent of its three-hundred-person staff. Soon after, TSR Hobbies changed its name to TSR Inc. and reorganized twelve executive divisions into six. But that wasn’t enough to stem the bleeding. Later in the year, the company laid off even more staff, shrinking to less than one hundred fifty employees. It contracted again in April 1984, to a staff of about one hundred.
In less than three years after Inc. magazine ranked TSR among the top ten fastest-growing private companies, TSR’s balance sheet went from low debt and an operating profit to $1.5 million in debt and an operating loss.
* * *
Out in Los Angeles, Gygax searched for a way to save the company. He tried to arrange a merger with Ian Livingstone’s UK-based Games Workshop, but Livingstone wanted to remain independent, and was wary of working with the Blumes (“I don’t think they were into the games like we were . . . we felt a little bit uncomfortable,” he says). Gygax also pushed Universal Pictures president Sidney Sheinberg to either write him a check to make the D&D movie or buy TSR outright—with no more success.
Finally, a five-hundred-year-old spaceman offered a chance at salvation. Gygax had been working with a writing partner, Flint Dille, on choose-your-own-adventure-style novels and to develop a fantasy film based on the world of Greyhawk. Dille’s grandfather had run the National Newspaper Syndicate in the 1920s and made a fortune publishing Buck Rogers in the 25th Century A.D., a comic about a World War I vet who was exposed to radioactive gas, fell into suspended animation, and woke up five hundred years later. Dille’s family had a fortune to play with—and his sister, Lorraine Dille Williams, was interested in working in publishing.
Gygax returned to Lake Geneva, and at the next monthly meeting of TSR’s board, he made the case to three formerly Blume-friendly directors that Kevin Blume had to go. “I fully expected to be dismissed at that time,” he wrote later. “Instead, the outside directors were forced to agree, as there was no question that the corporation was in debt to the bank for about $1.5 million and there appeared to be no way to repay the loan. In the final vote, Kevin voted against my motion for his removal, Brian abstained (which speaks volumes) and the stooges voted for it, so the motion carried four to one.”
But the board wasn’t ready to put Gary Gygax back in control. Instead, they replaced Blume with a temporary president from the American Management Association. So in May of 1985, Gygax exercised a stock option that gave him enough voting shares to retake control of TSR. He fired the pro tem president, assumed the role of CEO, and installed Lorraine Dille Williams as TSR’s new general manager.
“Shortly after this came my downfall,” Gygax later said.
* * *
1. In 1982, Mattel released another branded product, a D&D video game for their Intellivision console. At the time, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons was the most advanced computer game ever published, requiring over four thousand bytes of memory.
2. Dear pops up in the news media every few years: In 1984 he wrote a book about the Egbert case called The Dungeon Master; in 1995 he lent his investigative skill to a Fox television documentary called Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction? His latest effort, a 2012 book titled O.J. Is Innocent and I Can Prove It, argues that O. J. Simpson’s son killed Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman.
3. Sadly, Egbert couldn’t shake his depression; less than a year later he died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
4. Starday, Sunday, Moonday, Godsday, Waterday, Earthday, Freeday.
11
DEATH OR GLORY
When I was young, everything was simple. My friends and family were good; anyone who would hurt them was evil. I dedicated my life to protecting the things I loved and destroying the things I hated.
I haven’t wavered from that commitment. But as I have grown older, I have come to understand the truth is rarely so simple. I know now that while the vampires are our captors, humanity brought about its own destruction. Vampires hid from humans for thousands of years, afraid of our strength and our numbers; they only struck when we were weak from fighting among ourselves and when our threat to the planet was too great to ignore.
I still believe in humanity’s future. I know that one day we will free our brothers and sisters from the pens and deliver justice to the monsters that enslaved us. But I also know that we are imperfect beings and that we’re going to need help.
When Ganubi made first contact with the residents of Las Vegas, I hoped they might be new allies. Escorting a few of them back with us to San Francisco seemed like a step in that direction. But during the
long trip home, I started to worry. The four illithids who joined us were so alien and so cold. They were eager to learn about humanity but rarely willing to talk about themselves. They reminded me of predators studying their prey.
From time to time, Jhaden, Graeme, and I would walk far ahead of the group, so we could discuss what we’d do if our “friends” turned violent. Their psychic powers were a real threat, but from what we could tell, they didn’t seem to have any understanding of magic or even know that it existed. As long as I avoided casting spells in front of them, they’d underestimate our defenses.
Ganubi was more trusting, but he took me seriously when I shared my concerns. So as our ragtag group traveled through the desert and back up into the mountains, Ganubi spent day after day talking to the illithids, trying to make them sympathetic to our cause. He told them about human history and our struggle with the vampires, but he also shared our values, like respect for life and protecting your friends. He even dipped into the old human religions and told them stories from scripture.
At times, he reminded me of the crazy old preachers I’d seen on street corners when I was a kid. But the illithids hung on every word. I had no way of telling if Ganubi’s message was getting through to them, but they were listening, and that was a start.
When Gary Gygax decided to free TSR from the Blume brothers’ rule, he knew he needed help. At first, newspaper heiress Lorraine Dille Williams seemed like the perfect ally: She was rich, she was interested in publishing, and she had experience managing midsized organizations. So he asked her to invest in the company and help him retake control.
Williams, sensing the extent of TSR’s mismanagement, told Gygax that making an investment would be “money down a rat hole.” Instead, she suggested a different kind of help: to go to Lake Geneva and take a position in the company where she could help rein in TSR’s finances.
Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and The People Who Page 16
