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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mannahnin" data-source="post: 9679329" data-attributes="member: 7026594">In '82?  Absolutely not.  Gary didn't (edit, correction) move into the mansion for another year, and he didn't hire Lorraine until '85.  As Game Wizards and When We Were Wizards clearly document, Gary was still one of the people in charge of TSR, and tacitly or explicitly approving and agreeing with most Blume decisions, as they mistreated the creative staff and ran up absurd debts and overhead.  In March of '85 he took control again and brought in Lorraine, and they desperately needed her because they were loaded up with debt and sinking, and needed someone competent at management to right the ship.  Later Gary dumped ALL blame on the Blumes, but in retrospect now that more documentation has come to light, we can see that the version Gary told (and which you're uncritically parroting) was... incomplete is a generous way to describe it.Over the weekend I was just reading Flint Dille's book,  and he talks about how he wishes the two of them could have worked together more amicably and come to an arrangement where both worked in the respective roles they were good at, and that Gary at first told him he was very happy with Lorraine's work, though Flint cautioned him that he'd feel that way until Lorraine realized that "this" (gesturing at King Vidor's mansion in which they sat) was a part of the problem.Dille's take (scattered around the book, but the most focused chapter on the dispute is The Board Meeting, p 212-217) is very evenhanded.  It concludes thus:Most TSR staff who've gone on record have expressed that they preferred working for her than for Gary and the Blumes.What you've written there is just totally ignoring that Gary and the Blumes did the exact same kind of stuff.  Picking unnecessary fights (Origins, Chaosium, Mayfair, etc.), disrespecting Rose Estes' work on Endless Quest, failing to adequately compensate her and denying her promised stock options, bullying other companies with C&D letters, developing failed games like Indiana Jones or Boot Hill or what have you. Mistreating other creative staff, including refusing to honor stock options, refusing to honor royalty agreements and physically taking signed contracts away from staff, refusing to honor promised creative bonuses which were supposed to replace the royalties (look at how Zeb Cook and Lawrence Schick got absolutely screwed over by Gary and the Blumes on Star Frontiers), etc.I'm absolutely fine to criticize Lorraine for the downright stupid decision to mess with DC, and many other things, but the amount of stuff you're just ignoring from the previous regime is... substantial.Gary and the Blumes ran up a huge mountain of debt and had the company going under in about 10 years.  Williams made her own mistakes and kept it alive for 12.  Both eventually ran it into the ground, but Williams kept it alive longer.  <img class="smilie smilie--emoji" alt="🤷‍♂️" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f937-2642.png" title="Man shrugging    :man_shrugging:" data-shortname=":man_shrugging:" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" />  As Snarf wrote in one of his previous essays- "scoreboard".  I've never seen Williams go on record to blame the previous management for her mistakes.  Gary on the other hand seems to have taken almost zero responsibility for bad decisions made when he was one of the guys in charge.</blockquote>

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