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| publisher=Gen Con LLC
| publisher=Gen Con LLC
| accessdate=2006-07-04
| accessdate=2006-07-04
}}</ref> Also in 2002 TSR's magazines were transferred to [[Paizo Publishing]].<ref name="Wizards">{{cite web
}}</ref> Also in 2002 TSR's magazines were transferred to [[Paizo Publishing]].<ref name="Wizards">{{cite press release
| url=http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=company/pr/20020708b
| url=http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=company/pr/20020708b
| title=Wizards of the Coast Signs Exclusive Publishing Agreement With Paizo Publishing, LLC To Produce Top Hobby Industry Magazines
| title=Wizards of the Coast Signs Exclusive Publishing Agreement With Paizo Publishing, LLC To Produce Top Hobby Industry Magazines
| publisher=Wizards of the Coast, Inc.
| publisher=[[Wizards of the Coast]]
| date=2002-07-08
| date=2002-07-08
| accessedate=2006-07-04
| accessdate=2008-12-20
| location=Renton, WA
}}</ref> The TSR brand name continued for several years, then was retired. Soon after, TSR trademarks were allowed to expire.
}}</ref> The TSR brand name continued for several years, then was retired. Soon after, TSR trademarks were allowed to expire.


Revision as of 18:00, 20 December 2008

TSR, Inc.
IndustryRole-playing game publisher
Founded1983
Defunct1997
Fateacquired & discontinued
SuccessorWizards of the Coast
HeadquartersLake Geneva, Wisconsin, USA
Key people
Gary Gygax, Brian Blume, Lorraine Williams
ProductsDungeons & Dragons
Tactical Studies Rules
IndustryRole-playing game publisher
Founded1973
Defunct1975
Fatedissolved
SuccessorTSR Hobbies, Inc.
HeadquartersLake Geneva, Wisconsin, USA
Key people
Gary Gygax, Don Kaye, Brian Blume
ProductsDungeons & Dragons
TSR Hobbies, Inc.
IndustryRole-playing game publisher
Founded1975
Defunct1983
Fatesplit up
SuccessorTSR, Inc., TSR Ventures, TSR International and TSR Entertainment Corporation
HeadquartersLake Geneva, Wisconsin, USA
Key people
Gary Gygax, Brian Blume, Kevin Blume
ProductsDungeons & Dragons
SubsidiariesGreenfield Needlewomen

TSR, Inc. was an American game publishing company most famous for publishing the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game. The company was purchased in 1997 by Wizards of the Coast, which no longer uses the TSR name for its products.

History

Tactical Studies Rules

Tactical Studies Rules was formed in 1973 as a partnership between Gary Gygax and Don Kaye as a means to publish formally and sell the rules of Dungeons & Dragons, one of the first modern role-playing games. They first published Cavaliers and Roundheads, a miniature game, to start generating income for TSR. The partnership was subsequently joined by Brian Blume and (temporarily) by Dave Arneson. Blume was admitted to the partnership to fund publishing of D&D instead of waiting for Cavalier and Roundheads to generate enough revenue.[1] When Don Kaye died of a stroke in 1975, the Tactical Study Rules partnership was dissolved.

TSR Hobbies, Inc.

Brian Blume and Gary Gygax, the remaining owners, incorporated a new company, TSR Hobbies, Inc., of which Blume and his father, Melvin Blume, had the larger share. The former assets of the partnership were transferred to TSR Hobbies, Inc. Ownership of Melvin Blume's shares were later transferred to Kevin Blume. With the board of directors consisting of Kevin and Brian Blume plus Gygax, Gygax was primarily a figurehead president & CEO of the corporation with Brian Blume as President of creative affairs and Kevin as President, operations effect in 1981. In 1983, the company was split into four companies, TSR, Inc. (primary successor), TSR International, TSR Ventures and TSR Entertainment, Inc.[1]

Gygax left for Hollywood to found TSR Entertainment, Inc. (later Dungeons & Dragons Entertainment Corp.), which attempted to license D&D products to movie and television executives. His work would eventually lead to only a single license for what later became the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon.[2] The Blumes were forced to leave after being accused of misusing corporate funds and accumulating large debts in the pursuit of acquisitions such as latchhook rug kits that were thought to be too broadly targeted.[3]: 4  Within a year of the ascension of the Blumes, the company was forced to post a net loss of 1.5 million US dollars, resulting in layoffs for approximately 75% of the staff. Some of these staff members went on to form other prominent game companies such as Pacesetter Games, Mayfair Games and to work with Coleco's video game division.

Williams Ownership

Gygax, who at that time owned only approximately 30% of the stock, requested that the Board of Directors remove the Blumes as a way of restoring financial health to the company. In an act many saw as retaliation, the Blumes sold their stock to Lorraine Williams.[3]: 5  Gygax tried to have the sale declared illegal; after that failed, Gygax sold his remaining stock to Williams and used the capital to form New Infinity Productions.

Williams was a financial planner who saw the potential for transforming the debt-plagued company into a highly profitable one. However, she disdained the gaming field, viewing herself as superior to gamers.[4][5] Williams implemented an internal policy under which playing games was forbidden at the company.[citation needed] This resulted in many products being released without being playtested (some were playtested "on the sly") and a large number of products being released that were incompatible with the existing game system.

Through Williams' direction, TSR solidified its expansion into other fields, such as magazines, paperback fiction, and comic books. Through her family, Williams personally held the rights to the Buck Rogers license and encouraged TSR to produce Buck Rogers games and novels. TSR would end up publishing a board game and a role-playing game, the latter based on the AD&D 2nd Edition rules.[3]

In 1984 TSR developed Dragonlance, which consisted of an entirely new game world promoted both by a series of game supplements and a trilogy of novels written by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. "The Dragons of Autumn Twilight", the first novel in the series, reached the top of the New York Times Best Seller list, encouraging TSR to a launch a long series of paperback novels based on the various official settings for D&D. By the early 1990s, the profits from TSR's fiction department actually far surpassed that of their gaming publications. During the height of its success, TSR made an annual profit of over one million U.S. dollars, and maintained a staff of 400 employees.[citation needed]

However, problems grew in the company's business practices. After the emergence of collectible card games, TSR released several new collectable game lines: Dragon Dice and Spellfire. Neither found great success in the market place. Their inventory control became virtually nonexistent, and their warehouse became packed full of unsellable product. At the same time, TSR began retaliating against fan fiction and other creative work derived from TSR intellectual property, which angered many long-time customers and fans. Other new entrants into the RPG genre introduced competing fantasy worlds, which fragmented the RPG community, further reducing TSR's already wilting consumer base. TSR itself introduced no fewer than six campaign settings over the 1990s (Al-Qadim, Birthright, Council of Wyrms, Dark Sun, Planescape and Ravenloft, in addition to the traditional five settings of Mystara, Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk and Spelljammer), diluting its own fan base and creating competition between its expensive boxed campaign sets. Some campaign boxed sets (particularly Planescape) actually sold for less money than they cost to make. These and other factors, such as a disastrous year for its fiction lines in 1996 (over one million copies of tie-in books for various game lines were returned to TSR that year), led to TSR ending accumulating over $30 million in debt by 1996, and having to endure multiple rounds of layoffs.[5]

Ryan Dancey, Vice President of Wizards of the Coast, believed that TSR failed before of "...a near total inability to listen to its customers, hear what they were saying, and make changes to make those customers happy."[6]

With the decline of TSR, Wizards of the Coast, publishers of the collectible card game Magic: The Gathering, became the largest role-playing game company[citation needed]. Wizards of the Coast purchased TSR and its intellectual properties in 1997, ending the company's slow fall from grace.[7] TSR employees were given the opportunity to transfer to Wizards of the Coast's offices in Washington; some accepted the offer. Corporate offices in the Lake Geneva office were closed. Over the next few years, various parts of the company were resold to other companies, while in 1999, Wizards of the Coast was itself purchased by Hasbro, Inc. In 2002 Gen Con was sold to Peter Adkison's Gen Con, LLC.[8] Also in 2002 TSR's magazines were transferred to Paizo Publishing.[9] The TSR brand name continued for several years, then was retired. Soon after, TSR trademarks were allowed to expire.

Logos

Products

TSR's main products were role-playing games, the most successful of which was Dungeons & Dragons. However, they also produced other games like card, board and dice games, and published both magazines and books.

Role-playing games

Wargames

Other games

Magazines

Comics

In the 1990s TSR published a number of comic book series, some of them based on their role playing games.

Fiction

In 1984, TSR started publishing novels based on their games. Most D&D campaign settings had their own novel line, the most successful of which were the Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms lines with dozens of novels released in each.

TSR also published the 1995 novel Buck Rogers: A Life in the Future by Martin Caidin, a standalone reimagining of the Buck Rogers universe and unrelated to TSR's Buck Rogers XXVC game.

TSR published quite a number of fantasy and science fiction novels unconnected with their gaming products, such as L. Dean James' "Red Kings of Wynnamyr" novels, Sorcerer's Stone (1991) and Kingslayer (1992); Mary H. Herbert's five "Gabria" novels (Valorian, Dark Horse, Lightning's Daughter, City of the Sorcerers and Winged Magic); and also humorous fantasy fiction including Roy V. Young's "Count Yor" novels Captains Outrageous (1994) and Yor's Revenge(1995). However such projects never represented more than a fraction of the company's fiction output, which retained a strong emphasis on game-derived works.

Criticism

After its initial success faded, the company turned to legal defenses of what it regarded as its intellectual property. In addition, there were several legal cases brought regarding who had invented what within the company and the division of royalties. These actions reached their nadir when the company threatened to sue individuals supplying game material on Internet sites. In the mid-1990s, this led to frequent use of the nickname "T$R" in discussions on RPG-related Internet mailing lists and Usenet, as the company was widely perceived as attacking its customers. Increasing product proliferation did not help matters; many of the product lines overlapped and were separated by what seemed like minor points (even the classic troika of Greyhawk, the Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance suffered in this regard).

The company was the subject of an urban myth stating that it tried to trademark the term "Nazi". This was based on a supplement for the Indiana Jones RPG in which some figures were marked with "NaziTM". This notation was in compliance with the list of trademarked character names supplied by Lucasfilm's legal department[10]. Later references to the error would forget its origin and slowly morph into stories of TSR's trying to register such a trademark, possibly aided by TSR's own reputation late in its existence as a "trademark Nazi" company.

Notes

  1. ^ a b c Sacco, Ciro Alessandro (2007). "An Interview with Gary Gygax, Part I" (PDF). OD&Dities issue 9. Richard Tongue. p. 7. Retrieved 9/11/2007. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help); Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help); Unknown parameter |accessdaymonth= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |accessmonthday= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help) Cite error: The named reference "ODD009" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
  2. ^ Rausch, Allen (2004-08-16). "Gary Gygax Interview - Part 2". GameSpy. IGN. Retrieved 2006-07-05.
  3. ^ a b c Rausch, Allen (16 August 2004). "Magic & Memories: The Complete History of Dungeons & Dragons - Part II". GameSpy. IGN. Retrieved 2008-12-20.
  4. ^ "gygaxfaq: What Happened to Gygax - TSR?". gygax.com. Archived from the original on 1999-01-28. Retrieved 2006-07-04.
  5. ^ a b "Magic & Memories: The Complete History of Dungeons & Dragons - Part III: Mazes & Monsters". Gamespy. 2004-08-17. p. 1. Retrieved 2006-07-04.
  6. ^ Dancey, Ryan. "Archived Record". Archived from the original on 2004-05-30. Retrieved 2008-03-29.
  7. ^ Tidwell, Ken (1997-04-10). "Wizards of the Coast to acquire TSR". http://www.gamecabinet.com. The Game Cabinet. {{cite web}}: External link in |work= (help); Unknown parameter |accessedate= ignored (help)
  8. ^ "Biography, Peter D. Adkison". Gen Con LLC. Retrieved 2006-07-04.
  9. ^ "Wizards of the Coast Signs Exclusive Publishing Agreement With Paizo Publishing, LLC To Produce Top Hobby Industry Magazines" (Press release). Renton, WA: Wizards of the Coast. 2002-07-08. Retrieved 2008-12-20.
  10. ^ Laws, Robin D. (2007-08), 40 Years of Gen Con, Atlas Games, p. 139, ISBN 1-58978-097-3, MATT FORBECK: ... the last copy of the Indiana Jones roleplaying games. ... It actually has one of the legendary counters in it that reads 'NaziTM.' Which apparently was not TSR's idea, but Lucasfilm insisted that everything that appeared in the game have a "TM" next to it. {{citation}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)CS1 maint: date and year (link)
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