Wizards of the Coast

History

Peter Adkison, then a systems analyst at Boeing, founded Wizards of the Coast in 1990 in the Seattle area, working from his basement and naming the company after a wizards' guild in his D&D campaign. It began as a small roleplaying publisher. Its early books included the third edition of Stephan Michael Sechi's Talislanta (1992), revised by Jonathan Tweet, and The Primal Order, a system-neutral supplement about gods. Palladium Books sued over The Primal Order's references to its game, and the case, settled in 1993, shaped what came next.

In 1991 a mathematics graduate student, Richard Garfield, pitched Adkison a board game, RoboRally. Adkison thought it too expensive to produce and asked instead for something portable and quick to play. Garfield returned with a card game in which players built their own decks from a large, randomized pool. To keep it clear of the Palladium suit, Adkison set up a separate company, Garfield Games, which licensed the game back to Wizards once the case settled. Magic: The Gathering was launched at the Origins Game Fair in Dallas in July 1993. At Gen Con the next month it sold out the 2.5 million cards meant to last until the end of the year. Within two years Wizards had grown from a few people in a basement to about 250 employees, and in 1995 its sales passed $65 million. The Collectible & Trading Card Games had arrived, and every other game company scrambled to answer it.

Flush with Magic money, Wizards bought Ars Magica from White Wolf Publishing in 1994 and then, in 1997, the prize of the hobby. TSR, Inc. was drowning in debt; on April 10, 1997, Wizards announced it would buy it, together with Five Rings Publishing Group, then home of the Legend of the Five Rings card game, for a reported $25 million. Wizards paid TSR's debts, moved many of its staff from Lake Geneva to Washington, and began work on a new edition. In September 1999 the toy giant Hasbro bought Wizards itself for about $325 million, and later placed its own Avalon Hill line under Wizards' management for a time. The same year Wizards' English-language Pokémon Trading Card Game became a phenomenon.

Dungeons & Dragons 3rd edition (2000), designed by Jonathan Tweet, Monte Cook and Skip Williams, rebuilt the game around the d20 and released its core rules under the Open Game License, letting other publishers print compatible material. It set off a boom in "d20" products. Fourth edition (2008) moved away from that openness and split the audience; one beneficiary was Paizo, whose Pathfinder kept 3.5 alive. Fifth edition, led by Mike Mearls and Jeremy Crawford, arrived in 2014 and grew for years, helped by streaming shows such as Critical Role. Wizards licensed the rules to Larian for Baldur's Gate 3 (2023), and a revised core set followed in 2024.

The 2020s brought strain as well as success. Hasbro bought D&D Beyond in 2022 and handed it to Wizards. In January 2023 a leaked draft revision of the Open Game License caused an uproar; Wizards withdrew it and released the 5.1 System Reference Document under a Creative Commons license. Layoffs followed in December 2023. Former Blizzard executive John Hight became president in 2024, and in April 2025 longtime designers Chris Perkins and Jeremy Crawford announced they were leaving.

Notable work

Magic, still the company's largest business, created the collectible card game and much of the modern game-store economy. Wizards has also published every edition of D&D since 1997, the film tie-ins leading to Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023), board games, novels, and D&D Beyond.

Legacy

Wizards is the company that turned a hobby into an industry. Its card game changed how games are sold, its purchase saved D&D from TSR's creditors, and its Open Game License, for all the trouble of 2023, seeded Pathfinder, the Old-School Renaissance (OSR) and countless small presses. Today it operates in Renton, Washington, as the heart of Hasbro's Wizards & Digital division.