TSR The Dreams in Gary's Basement

[Mistwell]

Edit: here is a link to Jon Peterson's detailed, documented account of that meeting and its context, for those who are interested:

Oh so just to be clear, Jon Peterson is a sound source in your opinion now?

 

[QuentinGeorge]

I’ll add, I was literally in the room with Ben, Pat, and other historians a few years ago at Gary con before Ben released his book. Lorraine never gave her side. She’s always remained silent. So the only story we heard for the past 40 years was Gary’s side, by Gary loyalists and others who felt personally slighted by Lorraine. We only got one side, and as each year went by, the legend of the evil Lorraine grew. To this day, on nearly a daily basis, I see people comment about how she ruined D&D and if only Gary was still in charge.

That point shouldn’t be lost. We’ve been told for decades how the ambush was a dirty trick that robbed Gary. Knowing what I know now, I don’t think there could have been any other way. Knowing how Gary attacked Rob Kuntz in front of everyone—a person who was like an adopted kid, knowing how Gary treated people he felt slighted him, and I don’t think that ambush could have been different. They couldn’t have given him a heads up or warning, because they knew he’d lose his…composure. Which he did anyway. Which is unfortunate.

I don’t know why it’s so controversial to say Gary brought this wonderful game to all of us, made some really great creative decisions, and also was an ego maniac who made disastrous business decisions that drove the company into the ground. A guy who was fiercely loyal to those he got along with, and spiteful to those who he didn’t. And Lorraine saved the company for years, paid the employees, and worked for them while also being abrasive, and having no clue how the hobby worked or what made it special. They both had huge egos (you have to, to be a CEO). They both did good things, they both did bad things. They were people. Not a god, not a villain.

Yeah honestly for me the way Gygax treated Kuntz is a million times worse than Williams keeping trophies (if true). Williams was just a manager - the relationship between Gygax and Kuntz was way closer, and the betrayal all the more biting because of that.

I think we can say that D&D honestly didn't have competent management until Adkinson came along.

 

[Alzrius]

Lorraine never gave her side. She’s always remained silent.

This needs an asterisk by it, as there's at least one post-TSR instance of Lorraine speaking (albeit briefly) about her time at the company. It's in chapter eleven of David M. Ewalt's Of Dice and Men.

 

[Sacrosanct]

This needs an asterisk by it, as there's at least one post-TSR instance of Lorraine speaking (albeit briefly) about her time at the company. It's in chapter eleven of David M. Ewalt's Of Dice and Men.

Point being, if you want to find Lorraine's side, you have to really go hunting for it. Gary's side? All over the internet. And was all over the gaming community long before everyone used the internet. After he got ousted, he (or his friends) talked about it and how messed up it was. Lorraine never talked about it (nor would or should she, being the active CEO of the company, and CEOs never talk about how or why they fire someone). Starting in the mid 80s when Gary left, 99% of us only heard his side.

 

[Clint_L]

Eyewitness testimony is not hearsay. Three known documentarians, which is a fact finding artform, say they have direct sources as in multiple.

Here is the quote (which is already second-hand):

For instance, Frank Mentzer (IIRC it was Frank) mentions that Lorraine Williams liked to brag how, when she was president of student government back in college (I can't recall which college, but it was in California) she helped coordinate a concert, only to find that the guest musicians were using illegal drugs, at which point she shut down the entire thing.

She attended UC Berkeley as an undergraduate (history). Her short bio on Wikipedia makes no mention of her being "president of student government," which would be a very trail-blazing accomplishment for a female student in the mid-60s, and I can't find any mention of her in the documents collected at "150 Years of Women at Berkeley." So this story is already suspect.

The musicians in question were Jimi Hendrix and company.

According to Mentzer, Williams was quite proud of this, keeping a poster of Hendrix as a "trophy" over her having "fired" him. While the film states that the documentarians couldn't confirm the incident with Hendrix, there were multiple other TSR alums who verified that Williams kept trophies of people she fired.

So according to this description, the Hendrix thing is just some rumour, put out by someone who hated Williams, has said many derogatory things about her, and was a close ally of Gary Gygax.

The only support offered is that other TSR alums (are they identified?) claim that Williams kept trophies of the people she fired. Again, is there direct evidence offered of even this? Is there documentation?

I haven't seen the video. Maybe there is. But from this description, we've just got rumours.

Documentaries are a fusion of fact and entertainment, and most are as much opinion as journalism. Some are very careful with their facts. Some are not. The fact that this is a documentary is not in itself evidence of anything.

So we are left with an implausible rumour, spread by someone who has said many malicious things about the person in question. I'll continue to take it with a grain of salt.

 

[Clint_L]

Oh so just to be clear, Jon Peterson is a sound source in your opinion now?

Yes. His work is based on extensive documentation that is carefully cited, and he extrapolates as little as possible.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

He talks more about that in his memoir, The Gamesmaster: Almost Famous in the Geek '80s.

Flint Dille is an interesting guy - I get the feeling that he's done a lot, but also exaggerated a lot. His fingers are all over the 80s. I find the idea of the Scepter of Seven Souls fascinating, but I also think that it would've been best served as a module, not a movie. Imagine getting to connect all of TSR's classic worlds in a single adventure!

I would also add Eye of the Beholder--The Art of D&D to a nice day of D&D documentary binge watching.

Eye of the Beholder is probably my favorite modern D&D documentary. It's well-done, slick, and has all sorts of insights and interviews that tells stories no one has heard before.

I’ll add, I was literally in the room with Ben, Pat, and other historians a few years ago at Gary con before Ben released his book. Lorraine never gave her side. She’s always remained silent. So the only story we heard for the past 40 years was Gary’s side, by Gary loyalists and others who felt personally slighted by Lorraine. We only got one side, and as each year went by, the legend of the evil Lorraine grew. To this day, on nearly a daily basis, I see people comment about how she ruined D&D and if only Gary was still in charge.

That point shouldn’t be lost. We’ve been told for decades how the ambush was a dirty trick that robbed Gary. Knowing what I know now, I don’t think there could have been any other way. Knowing how Gary attacked Rob Kuntz in front of everyone—a person who was like an adopted kid, knowing how Gary treated people he felt slighted him, and I don’t think that ambush could have been different. They couldn’t have given him a heads up or warning, because they knew he’d lose his…composure. Which he did anyway. Which is unfortunate.

I don’t know why it’s so controversial to say Gary brought this wonderful game to all of us, made some really great creative decisions, and also was an ego maniac who made disastrous business decisions that drove the company into the ground. A guy who was fiercely loyal to those he got along with, and spiteful to those who he didn’t. And Lorraine saved the company for years, paid the employees, and worked for them while also being abrasive, and having no clue how the hobby worked or what made it special. They both had huge egos (you have to, to be a CEO). They both did good things, they both did bad things. They were people. Not a god, not a villain.

One of the brief asides in TDIGB claims that Gary Gygax yelled at a new Lorraine Williams in front of the entire board, and while it certainly seems in character with what we know of Gary Gygax as the CEO of TSR, it's also an unsubstantiated claim that seems a little too clean of a narrative, implying that the ambush at Seven Springs had an element of revenge to it.

 

[Parmandur]

Yes. His work is based on extensive documentation that is carefully cited, and he extrapolates as little as possible.

The reason he asks that is yhat Peterson was involved in the documentary film in question.

 

[Alzrius]

Flint Dille is an interesting guy - I get the feeling that he's done a lot, but also exaggerated a lot. His fingers are all over the 80s. I find the idea of the Scepter of Seven Souls fascinating, but I also think that it would've been best served as a module, not a movie. Imagine getting to connect all of TSR's classic worlds in a single adventure!

By Dille's own admission, they weren't married to the format; they were basically coming up with the story first, with the production details to be worked out later. To quote from his book:

The MacGuffin of the series was a sceptre forged by seven ancient sorcerers that divided into seven parts. Each part was a portal to a different world. I have no idea whether we thought we could fit all of this into one movie or we were selling them on seven movies or we had a "back pocket" idea of a TV series. We just thought it was a cool idea.​

​

Our hero was tentatively named Dart. He was a rogue/bard kind of a character. I had this goofy idea that he infiltrated enemy kingdoms guised as a magician with a traveling group of cutpurses with magical musical powers: one could hypnotize with their instrument, another could charm animals (like a snake charmer, but also birds, lions, dogs, whatever animal was necessary). Of course, all the wrong people were immune to his charms, and other wizards could turn his charisma into negativity.​

​

This band of loveable, musical, medieval thieves would always get wind of some treasure or some tyrant who needed assassinating or something and go on a mission. Of course, they'd always get in way over their heads and a desperate adventure would follow.​

​

We even figured there was a musical tie-in. After all, what are synthesizers, fuzz pedals, and the like other than magically enchanted musical instruments? So it was a heavy metal take on A Hard Day's Night set in a D&D World. Except the world changed. In fact, the genre changed. The only constant were the characters and the quest.​

 

[QuentinGeorge]

Point being, if you want to find Lorraine's side, you have to really go hunting for it. Gary's side? All over the internet. And was all over the gaming community long before everyone used the internet. After he got ousted, he (or his friends) talked about it and how messed up it was. Lorraine never talked about it (nor would or should she, being the active CEO of the company, and CEOs never talk about how or why they fire someone). Starting in the mid 80s when Gary left, 99% of us only heard his side.

Once WoTC brought Gary onside, he got to shape the narrative pretty closely (also here on Enworld due to being an active poster) but you've got to be very careful about taking one person's view as Gospel. For years I remember hearing about how the "Blumes" were the ones who recked TSR and hired a whole bunch of their useless family members in an orgy of nepotism.

Years later I find out Brian Blume and Jim Ward were still playing in an active D&D campaign together until the late 90s, and in Jim Ward's own posts here he explains that the nepotism extended to the Gygax family as well.

I look at how Ernie Gygax performed in kickstarters and his antics with TSR and think.... do you think he had his job at TSR on his own talent or the fact his dad was president?