A Book Review of Game Wizards: The Epic Battle for Dungeons & Dragons
I recently read Game Wizards: The Epic Battle for Dungeons & Dragons by Jon Peterson, a nonfiction book about the struggle for ownership of D&D between Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. It was an interesting and surprisingly moving book, so I thought I’d share my thoughts on it.
Game Wizards is thoroughly researched and well written. The prose is engaging and would interest someone even outside the hobby of RPGs. Over seven years of research, Peterson was able to get access to legal documents, internal TSR documents, rare fanzines, and personal letters; he interviewed many of the principal people involved, including Arneson and Gygax. I haven’t read other histories of the time, so I can’t check the accuracy of the facts, but Peterson certainly comes across as a reasonable narrator. He shows empathy but not sympathy to everyone involved, quick to put every number in the context of the industry and every decision in the context of understandable motivations. When it’s impossible to reconcile contradicting accounts he says so, and provides the evidence for both sides. In his own words, “real life is messy, unlike the alluring narratives we spin as we try to make sense of it all; real people are messier than the characters they adopt for themselves or project onto each other.” In particular, Peterson shows an almost disappointing amount of restraint when it comes to things like the sordid domestic details of Gygax’s time in Hollywood. He provides only as much information as is relevant to Gygax’s work with D&D, despite there clearly being material for a lucrative soap-opera of a book. That’s not to say it’s a dull read. The journalistic tone and escalating scale of TSR creates a sense of building tension throughout the book. There’s also a chill at the core of the narrative, like a Twin Cities winter or a Coen brothers film. It is not an uplifting story. The cynical specters of corporate politics, Satanic panic, and artistic frustration are forever lurking behind the festivity of games and conventions, and they occasionally come into view all too clearly.
In Peterson’s telling of the events, Dave Arneson is the world’s first dungeon master, the person who puts together a bunch of disparate ideas in the Twin Cities wargaming community to create what we would recognize today as a fantasy roleplaying game. Dave is also a young man who despairs of ever finding stable work or moving out of his parents’ home. Gary is a querulous man in his thirties unable to provide for his large family; after being fired from a low-level job at an insurance company, he works odd jobs, fixes shoes, and begs for money from his in-laws. He comes across as a less sympathetic Willy Loman, saved only from a bleak fate when he offers to publish a set of rules for Arneson’s game.
Just as there are no heroes in Game Wizards, there are no heroics: no great feats of artistry or business or leadership. Gary Gygax and Brian Blume build TSR, a clumsy gaming startup that picks unnecessary fights across the small pond of the wargaming hobby. Dave is a poor employee and Gary is a poor manager; a little capacity to adapt on the part of either one would have prevented their falling out. After his departure, Dave becomes a folk hero to all the unnecessary enemies Gary has made.
As Peterson presents it, the success of D&D is due mostly to chance. When mentally ill teenager Dallas Egbert III goes missing from college, the police find D&D materials in his dorm room. The police quickly figure out that there’s no connection between the hobby and the disappearance, but Egbert’s parents hire unscrupulous private detective William Dear. In search of fame and fortune, the mustached, Tommy-gun wielding private eye spins the media stories of D&D as a deadly occult game that only Dear himself can unravel to save Egbert. It’s too good a story for the press to pass up. D&D ends up on the national news, and when TSR are invited to tell their side of the story, it’s the kind of publicity that money can’t buy. This publicity lets TSR land a distribution deal with Random House, a major book distributor. While the rest of the hobby is sold only in dedicated game stores and amateurishly-printed catalogs, D&D is now a household name, for sale at nationwide retailers like Waldenbooks and K-Mart. This takes them from a company that makes hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to a company that makes millions. Dallas Egbert III, meanwhile, is eventually found. He ran away from Ohio, and after a failed suicide attempt, finds work on an oilfield in Louisiana. D&D was never a major part of his life. He successfully commits suicide a year later. It’s not clear how much his existing mental issues are to blame and how much is the pressure of constant media attention. William Dear goes on to sell multiple editions of a book about Egbert and chase media attention on other high-profile investigations. It’s a painful episode devoid of justice, and yet it’s the foundation of D&D’s success.
Eventually Arneson and Gygax go to court, and eventually they come to a settlement. Arneson receives what genuinely seems like fair financial compensation for his role in the creation of D&D. In the short term, he is seen by the active core of the RPG community, connected by fanzines and conventions, as a moral victor. As D&D grows far beyond that original community, his legacy is eclipsed until Gygax is mostly remembered as the creator of D&D. I can’t help but think that the real tragedy of Arneson is his inability to produce any notable work after D&D and Blackmoor. Game designers who were part of Gygax’s early TSR, like Jeff Grub or Doug Niles, have lengthy bibliographies of games, supplements, and novels to their name. Arneson has a tiny handful of adventures. He had lots of great ideas for other games, like a pirate RPG, but he struggled to write coherent rules or adventures, actively seeking help from other writers to turn his notes into something readable. His curse is to have been the inventor of a great gaming tradition but only that. Perhaps, in another time, he could have thrived as a Homeric storyteller, unrestricted by the need to trap his words on a page.
Gygax makes his fortune off D&D, but squanders it in Hollywood on luxury living, mistresses, and failed attempts to make a D&D movie. He ends up divorced, losing control of TSR, and losing creative control of D&D. The new TSR continues to be an unpopular company, and it becomes Gygax’s turn to go to the community and play the part of the wronged creator stripped of his work by an evil corporation.
One of Peterson’s central theses seems to be that Arneson, Gygax, and the Blumes approached business as an adventure – something they would say aloud in interviews at the height of their management of TSR – but that things fell apart because “business beyond a certain level cannot be pursued like an adventure.” I think that’s a poignant lesson for game designers and anyone engaged in business today.
Peterson with his journalistic tone would never condone this reading, but it’s hard not to see a certain folkloric quality in the story. Gary is a poor but faithful cobbler who wishes for the coin to feed his family; he gains the coin but loses the family. William Dear gains his fame and fortune attacking fantasy roleplayers, but he does it by selling a fantasy tale of himself as a dungeon-delving adventurer. Arneson seeks credit for his work, but when he wins credit and wealth, he finds himself unable to produce anything more. If it’s a fairy tale, it’s a modern one with a happy ending: Gygax finds new meaning in life as a novelist, and reconciles with Arneson in the 2000s. Both are treated well by the hobby in their final years. Peterson doesn’t delve into the fates of any of the less public figures who might have been hurt along the way.
Maybe the most interesting thing about Game Wizards is that it’s a history of the kind of people who usually don’t end up starring in history books: the kinds of people found in wargaming clubs of the US Midwest in the 1970s. As someone born in a later decade, the historical 1970s were a stranger place than I had imagined. My biggest surprise is how common industrial jobs are, and how easily they’re found. The bookish Gary Gygax, in his 30s and with no previous experience, supplemented his income as a shoe repairman with factory work. In a 1974 letter he mentions his body being bruised and his hands cut up after a long shift shearing 14 gauge steel for $2.90 an hour. Brian Blume worked in a tool-and-die shop. Don Kaye was a foreman at Lake Geneva Metal Spinning Company. Dave Arneson worked as a painter. Even Dallas Egbert III, a mentally unwell sixteen year old, was able to get a job on an oil field. It’s a far cry from the retail, restaurant, hospitality, medical, and military jobs of the gamers I’ve known.
I was also struck by how deeply religious both Dave and Gary are. Each of them counts their faith volunteering at the other main aspect of their lives. Gygax, a Seventh-Day Adventist, gives up gaming to spend more time on church work in the early 70s – a decision that doesn’t last. Arneson takes a break from running his own game company to go on a mission for Way International. We do get a few appearances from bigger stars of history. The early days of the Satanic Panic and its acolytes make their appearance, as do the fateful recessions of the early 1980s, helping to tear apart a poorly managed TSR.
I’d recommend Game Wizards to anyone with an interest in later 20th century history, regardless of their interest in RPGs. It won’t make you want to play RPGs – if anything, it might cool your enthusiasm for them slightly – but it’s an excellent work of history about the challenges a small group of amateurs face in founding a business.
Lyme Brackish,
9/8/2026