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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TiQuinn" data-source="post: 9425490" data-attributes="member: 4871">Thoughts (and spoilers):The star of the podcast to my mind is Rose Estes. She turned out to be the interview of a lifetime for this topic. I know, I know…you have to take every individual with a certain grain of salt, they all have their perspective, but when talking to a bunch of Midwesterners, the Minnesota or Wisconsin niceness can often get in the way of speaking plainly and clearly.Rose isn’t that.She’s got thoughts, good, bad, in the middle, about nearly everyone, and as one of the few women involved in the company, her perspective and access to Mary Jo Powell, gives a take on the whole affair that I don’t think we’ve heard before.I think it’s somewhat unstated but it’s lurking in the background - Lake Geneva was the perfect location in which to entrap people looking for the dream job as a game designer, which was very much NOT A THING at the time, and effectively stranding them somewhere where they were beholden to the company for their very survival because it wasn’t Chicago, or Milwaukee or the Twin Cities. These folks were working for peanuts and being subjected to treatment that, had they been in a larger employment area…they would’ve had options. They could’ve pushed back. But Gygax and the Blumes had a lot of people over a barrel because many of them moved out to Lake Geneva where there were no other job prospects, and they took full advantage of that.The one thing I think the podcast could’ve done better was letting the listener know who was speaking at various turns. The actor for Gygax was easily recognizable, as was Ernie and Rose’s distinctive voices but a lot of others really got lost in the shuffle, and it would’ve helped to state a name up front before switching to a statement, which they often did not do.But all in all, fantastic podcast. A testament to how one could be in the right place at the right time and hit the right pitch to get a home run…but still lose the game because you forget that being a founder and being a businessperson are two totally different things. I’m very hesitant to call Gygax a genius. In fact, I come away from this more than ever feeling like he was lucky and he saw an opportunity, but he wouldn’t have been there without Arneson, Megarry and others, and he most certainly didn’t have the genius to keep it going. Nor did he really want to. His creativity was one big burst, and then after that, he felt like he was owed everything else that came after. What he had was a cult of personality. It’s telling that his wife felt like she lost the children in the divorce and while again, not stated, but I can see why - you have the housebound dutiful religious wife and you have the funny dad who likes to play games and has money and just seems more fun. If you’re a kid or a teenager, whose side are you likely to be favorable to? Even at the end, most of the interviewees are willing to acknowledge Gygax as a bad businessman but as someone they want to play with, someone they like, and that was enough to elevate him above Williams - who was just a businesswoman, an executive, maybe what Gary would’ve called “one of the stooges”, trying to save the ship from sinking under the anchor of its founder.</blockquote>

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