It all started with taxes.
Legally avoiding them, that is. The sort called “Customs duties,” to be precise.
Back in those dear gone days, Canada (I’m Canadian, born and lifelong resident) let returning citizens legally import goods worth a paltry pittance (little more than a tank of gas in your car) if you were gone from Canada for 48 hours, and two hundred-something dollars if you were gone for a week (really 8 days or more, as you weren’t allowed to count the day you left the country).
And being as I was a gamer desperate to buy gaming stuff I couldn’t find in any local stores, and when it came to gaming stuff GenCon was Christmas, birthdays, and the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow all rolled into one, I lusted after that higher Customs limit. Which soon resulted in driving into the USA a few days before GenCon, every year, and driving home a few days after.
And once TSR jumped on the Realms, that got me invited to show up at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin and hang out at TSR for those few days. My wife and I would drive the 670 miles, sometimes stopping over with family in Windsor, and in other years doing it all in one long, long pilgrimage, put up at what later became the Harbor Cove hotel, and I would show up at the former Q-Tip factory at 201 Sheridan Springs Road and temporarily join in the happy insanity that was TSR.
Which was a company, yes, but was also a family, more so than any company I’ve seen the inner workings of before or since (I work in public libraries, and they’re families, too, but they aren’t really companies; nobody loses their library job because of poor sales).
And it was a family of, er, lunatics. Er, game designers, I mean. Folks who ran amok in the maze of aisles up in Cubicle Land with katanas, and wrote pithy sayings on a whiteboard in the games library, or hung all manner of things in their cubicle doorways, like artificial arms ending in Captain Hook-like hooks impaling “DO NOT DISTURB” signs. To say nothing of what was in the cubicles.
I shall censor the name of the faithful employee who kept duplicate copies of everything in his cubicle, and betimes slept overnight at his keyboard—and survived the eventual sudden collapse of his cubicle under the weight of all those games and game books and magazines only because he’d gone to sleep under his desk, and its demise folded over him, and prevented him being crushed and suffocated.
I discovered that the male designers kept a stack of Buck Rogers boxed games atop the toilet tank in the upstairs men’s restroom because management had installed motion sensors to turn out lights and save money, and anyone sitting on the porcelain in the single stall across the back of the room couldn’t be seen by the sensor, and would therefore soon be plunged into Stygian darkness (“Sty-piggian darkness”), until they reached behind them, grabbed the top game off the stack, and hurled it at the ceiling to make the light return so they could see to get out…or see anything at all.
The building was a maze, and different areas were dubbed such things as “the French Quarter” because of how they looked, or “The Grand Duchy” because of who in the company worked there. The art department was an artist’s dream of art references. No, not pages of naked ladies torn from magazines, I mean branches and bird’s nests, leaves, glass eyeballs, shards of broken glass and car chrome, and bits and pieces of human and other skeletons, so at will an artist at work could grab something, hold it under a lamp, and see the colours, and how it reflected light, and so on.
There was a Hardee’s chain burger joint down the hill behind the parking lot at the back of TSR (the building sat in a sea of mown grass, and backed onto a small shopping plaza) which was known to the TSR staff as “Hardly’s” (as in: hardly food).
Visitors like me had to have an escort, to keep them away from seeing “sensitive IP,” but employees had magnetic entry cards that could be slapped against square metal pads beside most exterior doors to unlock them at any hour of day or night; many creatives came in in the wee hours to get their work done with a minimum of interruptions from management, kibitzing colleagues, or meetings.
And to me, a D&D fan, it seemed like heaven.
All around me, cool new things were being created and nudged in the direction of publication, step by step. And people with bright minds alive with the fire of creativity were everywhere; some of them were soon to become friends, and all of them were My People. Gamers. THE gamers, the font of all the cool stuff I couldn’t wait to get.
And they were real people, sweating and swearing and working themselves to falling-over weariness at GenCon. People who could have animated arguments about how a fireball worked, or blade barrier spells manifested, or how two weapons could be wielded at the same time as the wielder used psionics and cast a spell.
I was never on staff at TSR. I was on the masthead of The Dragon as a Contributing Editor (Kim Mohan offered me the job) and later a Creative Editor, but those were unpaid positions, ways of printing more of my huge flood of submissions than other freelancers without offending anyone, and because it gave Kim (a journalist by trade, and a very good person) someone he could assign topics to, and get something back he could publish.
So those annual visits were my glimpses of heaven. The rest of the year, it was letters and courier packages and phone calls; there was no such thing as the Internet, back then. And it meant the world to me to be able to put faces to the voices on the other end of the often-crackling phone line.
And time has passed and D&D is in very good hands right now, but the world is a little less golden, because TSR isn’t in that building any more, and none of my friends are toiling away inside it, and the years have started to take them away, now…
And the world is a lot less golden.
Legally avoiding them, that is. The sort called “Customs duties,” to be precise.
Back in those dear gone days, Canada (I’m Canadian, born and lifelong resident) let returning citizens legally import goods worth a paltry pittance (little more than a tank of gas in your car) if you were gone from Canada for 48 hours, and two hundred-something dollars if you were gone for a week (really 8 days or more, as you weren’t allowed to count the day you left the country).
And being as I was a gamer desperate to buy gaming stuff I couldn’t find in any local stores, and when it came to gaming stuff GenCon was Christmas, birthdays, and the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow all rolled into one, I lusted after that higher Customs limit. Which soon resulted in driving into the USA a few days before GenCon, every year, and driving home a few days after.
And once TSR jumped on the Realms, that got me invited to show up at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin and hang out at TSR for those few days. My wife and I would drive the 670 miles, sometimes stopping over with family in Windsor, and in other years doing it all in one long, long pilgrimage, put up at what later became the Harbor Cove hotel, and I would show up at the former Q-Tip factory at 201 Sheridan Springs Road and temporarily join in the happy insanity that was TSR.
Which was a company, yes, but was also a family, more so than any company I’ve seen the inner workings of before or since (I work in public libraries, and they’re families, too, but they aren’t really companies; nobody loses their library job because of poor sales).
And it was a family of, er, lunatics. Er, game designers, I mean. Folks who ran amok in the maze of aisles up in Cubicle Land with katanas, and wrote pithy sayings on a whiteboard in the games library, or hung all manner of things in their cubicle doorways, like artificial arms ending in Captain Hook-like hooks impaling “DO NOT DISTURB” signs. To say nothing of what was in the cubicles.
I shall censor the name of the faithful employee who kept duplicate copies of everything in his cubicle, and betimes slept overnight at his keyboard—and survived the eventual sudden collapse of his cubicle under the weight of all those games and game books and magazines only because he’d gone to sleep under his desk, and its demise folded over him, and prevented him being crushed and suffocated.
I discovered that the male designers kept a stack of Buck Rogers boxed games atop the toilet tank in the upstairs men’s restroom because management had installed motion sensors to turn out lights and save money, and anyone sitting on the porcelain in the single stall across the back of the room couldn’t be seen by the sensor, and would therefore soon be plunged into Stygian darkness (“Sty-piggian darkness”), until they reached behind them, grabbed the top game off the stack, and hurled it at the ceiling to make the light return so they could see to get out…or see anything at all.
The building was a maze, and different areas were dubbed such things as “the French Quarter” because of how they looked, or “The Grand Duchy” because of who in the company worked there. The art department was an artist’s dream of art references. No, not pages of naked ladies torn from magazines, I mean branches and bird’s nests, leaves, glass eyeballs, shards of broken glass and car chrome, and bits and pieces of human and other skeletons, so at will an artist at work could grab something, hold it under a lamp, and see the colours, and how it reflected light, and so on.
There was a Hardee’s chain burger joint down the hill behind the parking lot at the back of TSR (the building sat in a sea of mown grass, and backed onto a small shopping plaza) which was known to the TSR staff as “Hardly’s” (as in: hardly food).
Visitors like me had to have an escort, to keep them away from seeing “sensitive IP,” but employees had magnetic entry cards that could be slapped against square metal pads beside most exterior doors to unlock them at any hour of day or night; many creatives came in in the wee hours to get their work done with a minimum of interruptions from management, kibitzing colleagues, or meetings.
And to me, a D&D fan, it seemed like heaven.
All around me, cool new things were being created and nudged in the direction of publication, step by step. And people with bright minds alive with the fire of creativity were everywhere; some of them were soon to become friends, and all of them were My People. Gamers. THE gamers, the font of all the cool stuff I couldn’t wait to get.
And they were real people, sweating and swearing and working themselves to falling-over weariness at GenCon. People who could have animated arguments about how a fireball worked, or blade barrier spells manifested, or how two weapons could be wielded at the same time as the wielder used psionics and cast a spell.
I was never on staff at TSR. I was on the masthead of The Dragon as a Contributing Editor (Kim Mohan offered me the job) and later a Creative Editor, but those were unpaid positions, ways of printing more of my huge flood of submissions than other freelancers without offending anyone, and because it gave Kim (a journalist by trade, and a very good person) someone he could assign topics to, and get something back he could publish.
So those annual visits were my glimpses of heaven. The rest of the year, it was letters and courier packages and phone calls; there was no such thing as the Internet, back then. And it meant the world to me to be able to put faces to the voices on the other end of the often-crackling phone line.
And time has passed and D&D is in very good hands right now, but the world is a little less golden, because TSR isn’t in that building any more, and none of my friends are toiling away inside it, and the years have started to take them away, now…
And the world is a lot less golden.
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