Husband, father, bridge designer, Chair of Net Zero Bridges Group, tabletop gamer, writer for Jonstown Compendium, occasional drone photographer. Interested in modern art, prehistory, weird music, architecture. Reads more non-fiction than fiction. He/him.
Brian Duguid
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Lorraine Williams appears very late in the narrative, by which point I could only applaud her flawlessly executed coup and her desire to revive a business that was otherwise being run into the ground. The whole thing is an object lesson to small publishers experiencing unplanned growth.
The Tl;dr version: Without Gary Gygax, there would be no D&D. He made it publishable and drove its early success, before showing his complete lack of business nous. Dave Arneson comes across as essentially useless, unable to finish any creative project and very fortunate to live off his royalties.
I also recently read The Making of Original D&D, also largely by Peterson (although not clearly credited?), although that book ends in 1977 so misses the increasingly wince-inducing TSR business disasters that came later.
It's a slightly odd choice for MIT Press's Game Histories series, as it's a detailed business history, rather than a book that has an academic agenda in the manner of much of the game studies / cultural studies field. But it seems pretty thorough, and I certainly enjoyed it.
