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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7796009" data-attributes="member: 4937">Well, I personally think it's unfair to tar Ray Kroc, because that situation if you look at the details turns out to be really complicated as well, and neither Ray Kroc nor the McDonald's Brothers come out as being as clean as a paladin in that one. First of all, the McDonald's brother didn't invent the fast food concept. They had gone to New Jersey and patterned their store after White Castle, whose techniques, marking, limited menu, and cooking hardware they had themselves shamelessly stolen. The brother repeatedly tried to screw Ray Kroc as well, including tricking him to sign a deal for "exclusive" franchising rights to a part of the country without telling him that they'd already signed away those rights to someone else and leaving him having paid for a useless piece of paper. If it were me, I would have immediately hit them up with a law suit for fraud, but Ray Kroc instead took the hit and bought out the other person they'd sold the franchise rights to and continued to try to work with the brothers even after he had learned that they were dishonest (intentionally or otherwise) as the day is long. Point is not that Ray Kroc is some shiny pillar of honesty and integrity, but that the sordid story about how McDonald's came to be is not a simple story of honest hard working brothers swindled out of their idea by a crooked villain either. So, even if Gygax was the Ray Kroc of this situation, my sympathy wouldn't be entirely one way or the other. Mistakes were made on both sides of that relationship. It's likely that they were made on both sides of the Arneson/Gygax relationship as well. Gygax and Arneson at least were able to work their differences out better than Kroc and the McDonald's brothers.</blockquote>

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