TSR, Inc.

History

TSR began because nobody else would publish Dungeons & Dragons. By 1973 Gary Gygax, an insurance underwriter turned shoemaker and wargame writer in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, had a manuscript built on Dave Arneson's Blackmoor campaign and his own Chainmail rules, but Guidon Games, Chainmail's publisher, could not take it on. In October 1973 Gygax and his childhood friend Don Kaye formed a partnership, Tactical Studies Rules, with $2,400 between them. Their first product was a miniatures game, Cavaliers and Roundheads, meant to raise cash; it did not. In December they admitted Brian Blume as a third equal partner to pay for printing, and in January 1974 TSR produced 1,000 copies of the three-booklet D&D set, sold for $10 each. The basement of Gygax's house was the headquarters. That first printing took ten months to sell out; the second, of another 1,000 in January 1975, went in five or six.

Then came the first blow. Don Kaye died of a heart attack on January 31, 1975. His widow, Donna, kept the books for a while, but the partnership had to be rebuilt. Blume and Gygax formed a corporation, TSR Hobbies, Inc., backed by $20,000 from Blume's father, Melvin, which bought out the Kaye share; the old partnership's assets were transferred on September 26, 1975. The new company moved into the Dungeon Hobby Shop at 723 Williams Street, and later to downtown Lake Geneva. It hired its first full-time employee, periodicals editor Tim Kask, and launched The Strategic Review, soon replaced by The Dragon (see The Strategic Review & Dragon). It published M. A. R. Barker's Empire of the Petal Throne and the board game Dungeon!, and from 1976 it ran Gen Con, the convention Gygax had founded in 1968.

Growth after that was explosive. TSR split its flagship in two: a Basic Set for beginners (J. Eric Holmes's edition, 1977) and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, whose hardcover Monster Manual (1977), Players Handbook (1978) and Dungeon Masters Guide (1979) became the hobby's scripture. Because AD&D was presented as a separate game, TSR stopped paying Arneson royalties on it, one root of The Gygax–Arneson Disputes. The company invented the published Adventure module and the boxed Campaign setting, beginning with the World of Greyhawk folio of 1980. It signed a distribution deal with Random House in 1979, gave British rights to Games Workshop, then founded its own TSR Hobbies UK in 1980. In 1981 it reported $12.9 million in revenue and 130 employees; by 1982 annual sales passed $20 million. The attention was not all welcome. After the 1979 disappearance of student James Dallas Egbert III was wrongly blamed on the game, D&D became a target of the Satanic Panic & D&D that dogged TSR through the 1980s.

Success bred sprawl. Run increasingly by Brian Blume and his brother Kevin, TSR bought a needlecraft company, the wargame publisher SPI, the rights to Amazing Stories, and a miniatures line, and paid to raise a shipwreck from Geneva Lake. In 1983 the company was split into four businesses; the game publisher became TSR, Inc., while Gygax went to Hollywood to sell D&D to film and television, producing mainly the Dungeons & Dragons. Rulebook sales peaked in 1983 and fell as the market saturated. By 1985 TSR owed its bank more than $1.5 million and cut about three-quarters of its staff.

The Williams era and the fall

Gygax returned in 1985, took control and ousted the Blumes, but still needed money. His Hollywood collaborator Flint Dille suggested his sister, Lorraine Williams, heir to the Buck Rogers fortune. She came in as general manager; the Blumes, refused by Gygax, sold her their shares instead, and on October 22, 1985, she used her majority to remove Gygax as president. He lost his court challenge and left the company he had founded.

Williams ran TSR for twelve years, and they were its most prolific. Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis's Dragonlance (1984) had already shown that novels could outsell game books; the Chronicles reached the New York Times list. Ed Greenwood's Forgotten Realms followed in 1987, AD&D's second edition in 1989, then Spelljammer, Ravenloft (1990), Dark Sun (1991), Al-Qadim, Planescape (1994) and Birthright. R. A. Salvatore's Drizzt books, from The Crystal Shard (1988), made the book department a profit engine. Licensed products brought computer games too: SSI's Pool of Radiance (1988) and its Gold Box successors put TSR's worlds on home computers. Williams also steered the company toward her family's Buck Rogers property, with a roleplaying game, novels and comics that failed commercially. Her record remains disputed; some staff credited her with saving a firm weeks from collapse, while Gygax and many fans cast her as the villain.

The collapse of 1996–97 had many causes. So many settings split a finite audience that later analysts found some products could never have made money. Card-game rivals to Wizards of the Coast's Magic: The Gathering, Spellfire (1994) and Dragon Dice (1995), cost more than they earned. TSR relied on "factoring" its hobby-store orders to banks and on its Random House deal, which advanced loans against shipped stock; staff joked about the "Banco de Random House." By June 1995 TSR owed Random House about $11.8 million, and Random House sued in 1996. Despite roughly $40 million in 1995 sales, TSR had little cash when Random House returned a flood of unsold novels and dice. Its logistics firm, which held the printing plates for the core books, stopped working. TSR laid off thirty staff in December 1996 and entered 1997 more than $30 million in debt.

On April 10, 1997, Wizards of the Coast, led by Peter Adkison, announced it was buying TSR; with Five Rings Publishing Group, which brokered the deal, the price was reported as $25 million.

Notable work

TSR's catalog is the foundation of the hobby. Beyond D&D and AD&D it published the three Basic lines of Holmes, Tom Moldvay (1981) and Frank Mentzer (1983); classic modules such as Tomb of Horrors and The Keep on the Borderlands; Gamma World, Top Secret, Boot Hill, Star Frontiers and the Marvel Super Heroes RPG; the Endless Quest gamebooks; and the magazines Dragon and Dungeon. Designers such as Jean Wells, Hickman, Greenwood, Jeff Grubb and David "Zeb" Cook learned the craft there.

Legacy

Wizards of the Coast settled TSR's debts, printed its stranded products, and moved much of its staff from Lake Geneva to Washington State. It used the TSR logo until 2000, when D&D's third edition appeared under the Wizards name alone, and let the trademark lapse around 2004. Two unrelated companies later revived the initials: Jayson Elliot's TSR Games (2011–2021, later renamed Solarian Games) and a 2021 venture involving Ernie Gygax and Justin LaNasa. Wizards sued the latter in 2022; that TSR filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in June 2023, halting the case.

The real legacy is harder to count. Every Game Master screen, every setting box, every tie-in novel shelf and every computer RPG built on Hit points and classes traces back to a company that began with two friends and a basement in Wisconsin.