I do not think many fans of D&D realize how lucky it is that Peter Adkinson bought TSR. If TSR went under, the various properties of TSR would have been split up and used to pay off debts to various creditors. Of course, such things leads to alternate realities that we do not live in, so I am sure some will say it would not have been that bad. I just have my doubts that Random House would have resuscitated the D&D brand in the way that WotC was able to in the 2000s. Seems unlikely any other company would have come up with the OGL, which enabled many 3rd parties to use the D&D rules and creations in their own rules.
Peter Adkinson’s fondness for _Dungeons and dragons_ and his Internet savvy was mentioned but not really expanded upon. In fact the first product that Wizards of the Coast produced was not _Magic: the gathering_ but a supplement for role-playing games, _The primal order_, rules for playing deities and demigods. He had done the TSR rules but wanted the broadest base possible, so he solicited advice from Usenet’s rec.games.frp.* hierarchy (and rec.games.rpg?) for conversion to other systems. I made suggestions for GURPS.
I probably owned 50 Dragonlance books by the time I graduated high school in 1999. Didn't get my first PC until 1994, but my search for Champions of Krynn led me down the classic CRPG rabbit hole so I had a chance to enjoy the classics before the "new" generation appeared with Diablo, Fallout, and Baldur's Gate.<p>The deal between TSR and Random House was interesting. Williams literally got to print money and get paid for whatever she delivered, but at the cost of building up a loan balance that would eventually come due. I know we make fun of MBA culture and bean counters but it takes a lot of discipline to run a company, and I wonder how the "blank check" influenced planning and production. Was it hubris that drove up an $12M loan? Was it poor communication from Random House to TSR about sales and forecasts?<p>It's also wild that if the TSR had lasted one more year it could have repaid its loan with the Baldur's Gate royalties and padded its war chest from the sequel and Neverwinter Nights. Business is a fickle beast.
Very interesting tale.<p>> “But why not just let TSR go bankrupt, and then buy it without assuming all that debt?” Adkison asked.<p>That would have saved Adkinson $30 million of a $55 million purchase; it seems that must have been significant money to his tabletop gaming company.<p>The answer in the OP is that Adkinson might lose the <i>Dungeons & Dragons</i> trademark, which had been pledged to Random House as collateral. I expect Random House would have been happy to sell it to Adkinson - in return for paying off TSR's debt, though maybe Adkinson could get a discount. The question is, how much was that trademark worth on the market?<p>Still, I wonder if Adkinson made that decision with head or heart.<p>> Peter Adkison held an all-hands meeting with the understandably nervous remaining staff of TSR on June 3. At it, he told them that he had bought the company for two things: for Dungeons & Dragons, yes, but also for the very people who were gathered in that room, the ones who made the game. TSR’s Lake Geneva offices would be closed, marking the end of Wisconsin’s unlikely tenure as the center of the tabletop-RPG universe, but most employees would receive an offer to move to Seattle and work in Wizard’s headquarters. With Magic doing such gangbusters business, Wizards of the Coast had the time and money to rebuild the Dungeons & Dragons brand carefully and methodically, even if it took years. They would soon begin work on a third edition of the rules, the most sweeping revision ever, intended to make the game understandable and appealing to a whole new generation of players without losing the core of what had made it such a sensation in the first place. The future of Dungeons & Dragons was bright, Adkison insisted.<p>Most acquisitions seem to begin with these assurances and then a year later it's all forgotten. Adkison seems to have actually meant it, at least somewhat. Did almost everyone get job offers in Seattle?
> <i>”In the past, it had been promoted as a game of free-flowing imagination, primarily a system for making up your own worlds and stories. In the future, the core rules would be marketed as a foundation that you built upon not so much with your own creativity as with other, more targeted TSR product”</i><p>I saw this happening with Lego as well. The free-flowing possibilities of buckets full of Lego bricks to created whatever you could imagine are now mostly gone. Kids and adults alike now buy Lego boxes with very specific bricks and a huge manual with a very exact step-by-step instruction. If you skip even one step the whole project is unfinishable. Those boxes actually punish creativity.
I came of age in the early- to mid-90's, when AD&D 2ed was on the rise, and Forgotten Realms was a huge, new, and exciting world. It seems like a frozen moment in time, those few years when I was obsessed with playing as much D&D as I could, riding my bike to wherever my friends' parents would let us use their dining room or garage, devouring rulebooks and novels, and eagerly awaiting the monthly delivery of Dragon magazine. I'm far removed from it now, and when I browse the RPG section in the bookstore or read the occasional article, it seems so different from back then.<p>Thanks for this trip down memory lane.
Did WotC get BioWare to make Baldur's Gate in 17 months? That article sounds like TSR had absolutely nothing going on by June of the previous year.
That's TSR as in "TSR. Inc", makers of Dungeons And Dragons tabletop game.<p>Not Terminate and Stay Resident utilities for old MS-DOS systems.
Not related to:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminate-and-stay-resident_program" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminate-and-stay-resident_pr...</a>
Is there a point to this story? It appears to be a description of a sequence of events remarkably devoid of any conclusion, climax, conflict, struggle, character development or whatever we usually see in stories.