Gen Con

What happened

In August 1967 a small group of members of the International Federation of Wargaming who could not travel to the club's convention in Pennsylvania met instead at the Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, home of an insurance underwriter named Gary Gygax. The gathering is remembered, half-jokingly, as "Gen Con 0." The following year Gygax rented the town's Horticultural Hall for $50, the IFW put up $35 of it, and on August 24, 1968, about 96 people turned up for the Lake Geneva Wargames Convention. The name "Gen Con" came from "Geneva Convention," a pun on the town and on the treaties that govern real war.

The early shows were about miniatures and board wargames. At the second, in August 1969, Gygax met two figures who would change his life: Rob Kuntz and a Minnesota wargamer named Dave Arneson. From 1971 the convention was co-sponsored by the Lake Geneva Tactical Studies Association, Gygax's local club, and that year Gygax and Jeff Perren's medieval miniatures rules Chainmail appeared in print. In 1974 Gen Con VII, the first three-day show, drew about 350 people in the year Dungeons & Dragons was published. TSR took ownership of the convention in 1976, and attendance climbed with the game: 2,300 in 1977, 5,000 by 1981.

Why it mattered

As D&D became a phenomenon, Gen Con became the place where the hobby met itself. TSR premiered products there, the D&D Open tournament (later the D&D Championship Series) began in 1977, and from 1981 the RPGA ran huge programs of "living" campaign play. The convention also absorbed the hobby's fears: when Michigan State student James Dallas Egbert III went missing in August 1979, some Gen Con XII attendees reported seeing him there, one strand in the press frenzy described under The Satanic Panic & D&D.

In 1985 Gen Con moved to Milwaukee's MECCA convention center, and in 1988 and 1992 it merged for a year with its rival, the Origins Game Fair. In August 1993 a small Seattle company, Wizards of the Coast, brought Magic: The Gathering to the show; its supply of about 2.5 million cards, meant to last until the end of the year, sold out, and the Collectible & Trading Card Games craze that followed is credited with lifting attendance to 30,000 in 1995. Magic's first World Championship was held at Gen Con in 1994.

Ownership followed the industry's upheavals. Wizards bought TSR, and with it Gen Con, in 1997; Hasbro bought Wizards in 1999; and in 2002 Peter Adkison, Wizards' founder, bought the convention from Hasbro and formed Gen Con LLC. He moved it to Indianapolis in 2003, citing hotel space, the Milwaukee hall's layout and its broken escalators.

Legacy

Indianapolis has been good to Gen Con, and Gen Con to Indianapolis: the Indiana Convention Center's major expansion, completed in 2011, was built in large part to hold it. The show survived a 2008 Chapter 11 filing triggered by a dispute with Lucasfilm over a Star Wars convention it had run, emerging in January 2009. It then rode the new boom in board games and fifth-edition D&D: attendance passed 60,000 in 2015 and reached roughly 70,000 in 2019. After an online-only 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, it returned to about 70,000 in 2023 and 71,000 in 2024, the fiftieth anniversary of D&D.

Today's Gen Con hosts the ENnie Awards (since 2002), True Dungeon's life-size dungeon crawl, charity events such as Cardhalla, a city of donated cards demolished by thrown coins, and live shows by actual-play troupes including Critical Role. Its owners have also used its economic weight in Indiana politics, publicly opposing state legislation in 2015 and 2022. Through all of it the oldest tradition survives: Fight in the Skies, now Dawn Patrol, a First World War air-combat game, has been played at every Gen Con since 1968.