John Tynes

Over the stairway that led down to Ye Olde Gaming Hall loomed a massive sculpture of a Minotaur head. When the store closed, unable to generate sufficient profits for Wizards’ new corporate owner, Hasbro, impatient workmen pried the head off the wall in chunks, escorting them to the curb, where they awaited an uncertain fate.

The store had been the Xanadu of geekdom, erected by gaming’s own Kublai Khan: Peter Adkison, founder of Wizards and a cherubic visionary who imagined a better, more goblin-infested world where gamers played games and no one gave them wedgies.

I worked at Wizards back in its halcyon days, when we all bought into Peter’s vision. Today, as I watch the carnage wrought upon another crop of idealistic and iconoclastic start-ups — the new-economy dot-coms — it is hard to escape the feeling that the story of Peter and his company, Wizards of the Coast, stands as an eerie prototype for the entire dot-com experience. Wizards blazed a trail through corporate culture that turned old notions of professionalism and workplace community on their head in the pursuit of a Utopian ideal where geeks would be rich, be cool and get laid. Unlike the dot-coms, however, Wizards survived and even thrived because Peter learned an important lesson early on: Kill your illusions before they kill you.

Once a humble Boeing aerospace drone, Peter founded Wizards in 1990 to publish “The Primal Order,” a role-playing game book intended as a generic add-on to whatever game you were already playing. “Primal Order” was all about deities and pantheons, the power-heavy end of the fantasy role-playing spectrum. Among other things, it provided formulas for esoterica such as how many trolls were praying to their god in a given month — chicken soup for the soul of many gamers. Peter wrote much of the book himself and assembled a coterie of enthusiastic, aspiring young professionals to bring it to market in their spare time.

An appendix inadvertently packed with copyright violations landed the fledgling basement operation in hot legal water with Palladium, a competing publisher whose game was referenced without permission in “The Primal Order.” Palladium sued.

While the court process dragged on, Peter and his friends turned to a greener pasture. Mathematician Richard Garfield had conceived a revolutionary product: a collectible card game, with customizable decks and a distribution system of common and rare cards sold in slim packs like baseball cards. To build a better deck, you had to buy or trade more cards. And although Garfield intended the scheme to be an interesting exercise in metagame design, its potential as a financial gravy train was also an intriguing factor.

As a legal shelter from the copyright-infringement case, Peter set up a new corporation, Garfield Games, which developed what came to be Magic: The Gathering. Garfield Games then licensed the production and sale rights to Wizards until the court case was settled, at which point the shell company was shut down. It was a sterling piece of gamesmanship that kept the valuable new property shielded from the courts, the corporate equivalent of three-card monte.

Wizards first showed off Magic in the summer of 1993 at the Origins game convention in Dallas. I had my own small gaming company, Pagan Publishing, at the show and spent some time hanging out with the Wizards folks. They had just received the first small shipment of actual printed cards from Belgium, and seduced my business partner Jeff and me into giving it a whirl. Intoxicated from heavy drinking and coached by Peter and the other staffers, Jeff and I played the first game of Magic using actual cards.

It was a disaster. The game creaked past an hour and was an interminable bore. Peter assured us that this first batch mostly consisted of specialized rare cards, which in practice should only be used sparingly. Whatever. We left the convention thinking that Wizards had an expensive failure on its hands.

A year later, Wizards hired me. In the months in between, Magic had hit the gaming hobby like an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, spreading virally from geek to geek with its combination of endless strategy and collectibility. It was propelled by the nascent popularity of the Internet, where the Magic Usenet discussion forum swiftly became one of the most popular in the world — occasionally usurping the place of even the pornographic-picture forums at the top of the virtual geek-culture heap.

Although Wizards didn’t even have a Web site back then, the parallels between the company and the dot-coms that followed were numerous — in some parallel universe, Peter Adkison and Jeff Bezos must be star-crossed lovers. Like the founder of Amazon.com, Peter was a geeky idealist who started a new company in his Seattle home and launched a product whose success was interwoven with that of the Internet itself, as early adopters of the game filled Usenet forums with discussions of strategy and recipes for specific deck constructions. Peter even pitched Wizards as a customer-centric company, hiring an ever-widening swath of young customer service reps who could interpret the arcana of Magic rules to gamers on demand via e-mail and telephone. This was an unheard-of innovation in the gaming industry, where rules questions were usually answered by whatever bearded company grognard opened the fan mail on a given day, and only then if you included a SASE and made an intelligent reference to Robert Heinlein.

Wizards also experienced explosive growth. I joined the company in May 1994, when there were about 50 employees — already up massively from a year earlier, when only a handful of people worked at the company. By the summer of 1995, the employee rolls stood at 250 and climbing.

In addition, Wizards used strategic alliances to co-opt competitors, much as Amazon.com did with companies like Drugstore.com and Pets.com. Peter quickly cut license deals with other game companies so that Wizards could produce new trading-card games based on its most successful properties. This delayed the entry of those companies into the market as direct competitors, especially when Wizards simply sat on many of the licenses indefinitely. Some of the best properties in gaming missed out on the early years of the trading-card gold rush, gathering dust in the licensing-agreement file cabinets of Wizards of the Coast.

But finally, the most important area where Wizards innovated and dot-coms unknowingly followed was in the workplace itself. Peter had a vision for a new kind of company, a company that could change the corporate world forever. We served as his lab rats — and soon we would be lost in the labyrinths of his heart.

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Amid the chaos of those early days, I arrived at Wizards a couple of weeks before my boss did. He was Jonathan Tweet, an innovative role-playing game designer responsible for Ars Magica and Over the Edge, and he hired me to serve as his lieutenant. Now that Wizards was consumed with card games, Peter faced a challenge: how to continue publishing the kinds of role-playing game material he dearly loved when trading-card games like Magic were vastly more successful. Our charter was to expand the audience with a breakthrough game, and Peter assured us we were not merely to be the caretakers of a Wizards role-playing museum. He still ran his own Dungeons & Dragons campaign, after all, and enthusiastically wanted his company to continue publishing role-playing books.

The first thing I noticed about my new employer was how the halls of the offices ran rampant with representatives of alt culture. Up to that point managers’ hiring practices seemingly consisted of recruiting anyone they gamed, partied or slept with, and preferably all three. If you were a Seattle gamer in 1994-95, you had to be willfully incompetent to not get a job at Wizards. (That happened, of course. One guy interviewing for a customer service position expressed enthusiasm at the anything-goes dress code, since it meant he could wear his “Star Trek” uniform to work every day. I myself interviewed Raven C.S. McCracken, who was already a legendary industry boob for his terrible self-published role-playing game, the World of Synnibarr. When Raven told me that if I didn’t hire him his next job interview would be at Burger King, I thanked him for his time and politely showed him the door. The aspiring Enterprise crewman suffered the same fate.)

In particular, the goth subculture of Seattle was strongly represented, with numerous employees dressed in black and various bits of metal glinting in their clothes or skin. The crossover between the goth scene and the role-playing geek community was strong thanks to Vampire: The Masquerade, a hugely successful game whose premise was ripped bleeding from the novels of Anne Rice. The goths of Wizards had the cheerful, morbid humor endemic to their society, along with a dramatically heightened sense of outrage to perceived slights or efforts to sell out. One employee, Rhias, wore an impressive variety of black corsets to work every day and kept a mummified dead cat nailed to the wall of her apartment. Her manager, Steve, had a wicker basket on his desk. When subordinates came to ask him something, he would act out lines from “The Silence of the Lambs”: “It puts the lotion in the basket! It does this whenever it is told!” Until you put a bottle of hand lotion in the basket, he would not answer your question.

We were young, overeducated and underemployed. Wizards was my first job in the real world — if you can call it that — and I was hardly alone.

Above all, we were equals. Peter Adkison told us so. He had left Boeing with a sacrament of buzzwords and platitudes that he transmuted into full-bore Utopian evangelicalism. We would work in organic cross-departmental teams, study the esoteric principles of “Continuous Quality Improvement,” and always strive toward the paramount goal of consensus, the magical process that somehow replaced old-school hierarchical decision making. We received exorbitant salaries, cradle-to-grave health and mental benefits and a magnanimous 401K plan, and there were whispers of stock options — not that we knew what they were in those innocent days, when we browsed the Web with Mosaic and hung out on AOL.

There was free soda, free parking and free T-shirts. We played computer games after hours, bought cars and houses, made therapy appointments with a zero deductible and pursued the same goal. It was the mission statement Peter had conceived during an endless team meeting: We would make games as big as the movies.

Of course, they already were. Computer games were beginning to best Hollywood in revenues. But we wanted to bring that success to analog games, to coin a phrase — card games, board games and role-playing games. We wanted families, hipsters, political prisoners, heads of state and space aliens to all play our games, as often as they could, and bring about a smarter world where people talked to each other more often. About goblins.

Grand as that goal was, I don’t believe it was the heart of Peter’s vision. That honor lay with his dream of revolutionizing corporate culture itself, of making Wizards a new kind of company. We would build an alt-culture workplace of smart young people. We would destroy hierarchies by a resolute program of egalitarian consensus. We would earn fabulous paychecks and free dental treatments. We would encourage diversity in every form.

Best of all, though, we would fuck like rabbits. On “Who Knew? Day” employees wore badges proclaiming their sexual orientation. Intimate relationships sprouted like mold on bread, cutting across departments and seniorities with the hierarchy-smashing fervor of our consensus-driven team meetings. Heedless of status, even peasants and princes coupled, and fell apart.

The example was set right at the top: Peter and his wife, also an employee, had an open marriage. Wizards was a big horny summer camp, and we were starring in the teen sex comedy of our fevered dreams.

That August brought GenCon, the largest game convention in the country, and 20,000 or so joyful, pimply gamers descended on mild-mannered Milwaukee. That year Wizards took the unusual step of sending the entire company to the convention as an extravagant team-building exercise. It was four days of metaphorical firewalking, and when we came back we were exhausted.

Not content to stop there, Peter had another plan. He would rent a sizable ski lodge and charter a bus, and we’d all spend a weekend frolicking in the woods. About 30 of us went. We played games, ate junk food and drank heavily. And then, late at night, a bunch of us piled into a dark room and played Truth or Swill.

The game was organized, more or less, by Kyle, the head of customer service, and Corey, a co-worker of Rhias and Steve who helped them run the Magic tournament league. Both were gleeful cynics, black-humored children of goth and all-around entertaining guys. Before the game started Kyle was busy shaving Corey’s head so he’d look more like Jean Reno in “The Professional.”

Truth or Swill is one of those elemental games people play to break down social barriers. Each player in turn asks another player a personal question, and the player either answers truthfully or has to drink a shot of some crazed liquor swill. The questions typically deal with sex, in an ever-descending spiral of lewdness and intimacy. Truth or Swill is an unusual game in that it relies completely on trust. Any player can lie with impunity. There’s no mechanism to challenge a statement, no formula to define interpersonal bonding.

The Wizards’ Truth or Swill session was no different. By candlelight we climbed onto bunk beds, drinking steadily, and dropped our boundaries. One of the most common questions, of course, was which Wizards employee you would like to have sex with — or had already had sex with.

Basking in shoulder-to-shoulder solidarity with his employees, Peter Adkison rattled off his workplace sexual encounters, both actual and desired. He wasn’t boasting, vain or predatory. He just loved all of us, from the depths of his innocent geek heart, and saw nothing wrong with talking about his corporate sex life. We were all in this together, pioneering settlers of a new and better world.

Among a group of friends or colleagues, a game like this can be an amusing if occasionally disastrous good time. But among co-workers, on an official company function, with the CEO of the company and Linda, the head of human resources, openly participating, well … it was a train wreck.

Not that we realized it that night. I didn’t pay any attention to Carrie, a newly hired employee and sister to one of the executives, who came in for a few minutes and then abruptly left. No, that night the Utopian egalitarianism of Peter Adkison’s geek vision revealed its most intimate summit: Wizards was indeed all about geeks getting rich, cool and laid, with nary a wedgie in sight. At long last, we had achieved consensus.

Like the dot-coms that followed, we were going to build a planet where geeks evolved from humans. But all we built was a madhouse, and then the bastards blew it up.

Part 2: How Wizards of the Coast wised up, and traded drinking games for the fun of brand management.

“This is becoming a company I don’t want to be a part of anymore.”

I didn’t know what to say. I closed my eyes and thought about that wonderful world we had dreamed of in the depths of night, even as I felt it slipping away.

On Monday morning, I was summoned to a private meeting. Peter was there, as were Lisa and Vic, an abashed Linda, Brian the barefoot company attorney and Corey. They’d invited Corey since he was one of the organizers of the game, but I was present as some sort of vox populi, a representative of the rank and file. I wondered if Peter had asked for me.

The upshot was simple. Peter believed he’d done no real wrong, since his participation was emblematic of the kind of geektopia he was trying to build. The other stone-faced managers thought he was a fool. Corey angrily promised to shun any future company social events, as he felt he no longer had permission to communicate with his co-workers on anything other than a purely professional level. I mostly kept quiet — the whole ugly scene was just depressing.

After the meeting, the board of directors reprimanded Peter and docked him a month’s salary.

We had failed to achieve consensus. Management believed Peter had jeopardized the entire company with his behavior, the very behavior that the rest of us at the party thought was helping to strengthen it. We had little conception of sexual harassment laws, hostile work environments and all the other issues of the modern workplace.

We thought we were building a postmodern workplace, a cheerful throwback to an imagined past where an intimate guild of valiant heroes and heroines worked hard, played hard and made history, to borrow a slogan from Jeff Bezos. But in short order, we were just another corporation.

That fall, as if impelled by some kind of counterreactive force emanating from the wreckage of the Truth or Swill game, Wizards moved swiftly into the mainstream of corporate thought. Peter hooked up with the Beanstalk Group, a brand-exploitation agency that handled the licensing of intellectual properties, a business-speak way of saying it was responsible for taking brands like “Star Wars” and slapping them on T-shirts, birthday-party favors, video games and children’s underwear. The people at Beanstalk believed Magic: The Gathering was a hot intellectual property, and soon Peter was talking brand this and brand that. Magic got a brand manager and a brand team, responsible for guiding the property in abstract, reputation-building ways and building licensing alliances with other companies.

Consultants and reorganization plans came and went. It felt like Peter was herding us through a new business philosophy every month or so. At one training session, the latest consultant asked for a show of hands: “Who here works in R&D or production?” Some hands went up. “You guys have job security. The rest of you are expendable.” He wasn’t invited back.

Later on, another consulting team did get a call back. Peter got a new philosophy, a consultancy pork barrel of a concept known as PDCA: Plan, do, check and act. PDCA’s focus was on process, that mystical endeavor so beloved by managers and the consultants they hire. These particular consultants gave three-day seminars to small groups within the company, and Peter liked the project so much that this went on for the better part of a year as the consultants worked their way through the employee roster.

At each PDCA training session, one of the consultants put a graph on the overhead projector and made an amazing statement. She said that in any data set, if you have three consecutive points that are “trending” — moving in a consistent direction — then there’s a 68 percent chance the fourth data point will be contrary to the trend.

When it was time for the math geeks in R&D to go through the session, they really loved this howler. The PDCA training team was suggesting that, for example, three days of growth on Wall Street had a 68 percent chance of being followed by a downturn. If your child grew for three years, it was 68 percent likely he’d shrink in the fourth year. It was complete nonsense. When the R&D guys pressed for an explanation, the team assured them it was true. Their script said so.

Perhaps this principle originally had a context where it was meaningful. But now it was just so much pablum. Was it any more crazy than our original sex-for-all pro-goblin agenda? Maybe not. But it was boring as hell.

Once the whole company had gone through the PDCA wringer, the program was forgotten. New employees didn’t hear about it. Like an unmoored ship, the concept of PDCA simply drifted off into oblivion. It was memorialized by R&D in the cyberpunk game Netrunner, where it appeared as a card called “Please Don’t Choke Anyone.”

But mostly, life at Wizards was now all about the brand. The influence of the Beanstalk Group and the whole philosophy of branding was insidious. The more Peter explained branding to us, the more it seemed like some kind of Zen koan, an enigma wrapped in a riddle. We identified the core values of our brand using words like “smart” and “fun” and “social” that told us nothing we didn’t already know, yet somehow they made us feel good. We lived in dread of “juvenilizing” the brand, though a card game full of knights and dragons already seemed pretty juvenile to me. We selected “iconic characters” for different products, which didn’t actually have to be important to the story or the game but just had to look good. I felt like we were all foreign travelers, conversing with one another with the help of bad phrase books.

When the manager of a Wizards demonstration tour commissioned a painting of a Magic character to use on a poster, the brand team flipped — it hadn’t picked an iconic character for that card set and the brand was in danger of spiraling out of control. Alert! Alert! After all, the manager hadn’t used proper brand-development processes. He just picked a character he thought was cool and hired a good artist to paint it. Once, this would have made him an effective employee. But in Wizards’ brave new world of branding, it was a mortal sin.

Peter held up Disney as an exemplar, the master of brand management. The Mouse was riding high in those days, resurgent since “The Little Mermaid.” It built winning properties and exploited them brilliantly. At brand meetings, people would invoke the name of Disney and we’d all nod sagely. Disney was it.

Then Disney knocked on our door. It wanted to do an afternoon children’s cartoon based on Magic, and I was invited to the pitch meeting.

I expected to have my socks knocked off and, indeed, Disney’s preparation was impressive. It had a whole show concept ready, with character art and sketches to show off. I was amazed the company had invested this much work in a cold pitch — but this was Disney, after all, and it must have known what it was doing. I sat back and listened as the Disney folks made their presentation.

The show was about a hip teenage boy transported to a fantasy world. He was the son of some good wizards who, in his infancy, hid him in our world to save him from the bad wizards. Now he was back in his home world, a fledgling wizard wearing a T-shirt, jeans and sneakers as he cracked wise, ate pizza and cast spells while going on adventures with a dimwitted barbarian sidekick who — and this was the big twist — hated wizards.

In short, it was absolute crap.

Even worse, perhaps, it had nothing to do with Magic: The Gathering. The truth emerged soon enough. Disney’s television animation department had already pitched its managers on this nonsense and was rightly shot down — hence all the existing art and designs. They hoped that by simply slapping a Magic logo on the whole thing they could get their show approved and on the air.

It was a complete contradiction of the vaunted brand philosophy, and it was Disney itself that was doing the contradicting. We sent the company packing.

My encounter with the alleged masters of brand management made Peter’s fervor for this strange religion seem faintly ridiculous. The entire concept reeked of the emperor’s new clothes, since “branding” could easily be distilled down to “make good products you believe in,” which was how we used to talk about our work when I first joined the company all of 12 months earlier. Finally, I agreed with what Peter had said: This was becoming a company I no longer wanted to be a part of.

I resigned in June 1995, sick and tired of what the company was becoming and always conscious of what it could have been.

Corey lasted longer. He exacted his bitter revenge against management, though. At a Magic tournament in New York he set up a dress code for staff that consisted of black pants and brown shirts. This, combined with the black and red event banners he commissioned, made the whole thing look like a Nazi rally. Last I heard Corey was somewhere in Florida. I can only hope he is running guns.

Jonathan Tweet, my former boss, stayed on. Peter had charged him with expanding the audience for role-playing games, and he was under pressure to deliver a substantial hit. To accomplish this, Jonathan conceived a marvelous new game called Everway, a genuinely radical, experimental work of group storytelling. The game would include a set of fantasy art trading cards the players used as inspiration — sort of like Rorschach blots with better illustrations — and instead of rolling dice, the game master would draw a card from a Tarot-like deck and adjudicate the action symbolically. It was such a departure from the mainstream, in fact, that it generated no small amount of controversy among employees. Some believed the project was doomed to find only a niche audience; as graphic designer Daniel Gelon said at the time, “It’d be a great game if we could pack Jonathan Tweet or John Tynes into every box to actually run it for people.” But Peter supported the project 100 percent.

Everway debuted in August 1995 with a resounding thud. Most gamers found it too strange and New Age-y. And Wizards’ ill-conceived policy of requiring distributors and retailers to order and stock the game if they wanted better allocations of Magic cards soured the entire channel on the product. To the gaming industry, Everway might as well have been Ebola.

Four months later, Wizards laid off the role-playing department and Everway was scrapped.

Rhias wore white. Like the rest of the company, she was in mourning.

Outraged employees viewed those layoffs as evidence that Peter had sold out, but they were wrong — he had simply bought in. Peter had changed. The magically innocent decadent of the Truth or Swill game was gone, replaced by a man who obsessed over old-school corporate buzzwords like brand management and category leadership. He even got an MBA.

The new Wizards stopped innovating and started cherry-picking, using its substantial resources to buy winners rather than build them. Once, Peter had said that Wizards’ creation of original intellectual properties was critical to its success. But soon enough, Wizards was publishing lackluster card games based on “Dilbert” and “Xena: Warrior Princess.”

Another cherry-pick was TSR, the original publisher of Dungeons & Dragons. When the company hit the skids in 1997, Peter snapped it up and got Wizards back into role-playing. While D&D was a nostalgic favorite, it also qualified as a category leader and a global brand. For a moment, it was as if the old and new Peters were reconciled.

But then came Pokémon. Nintendo of Japan designed the Pokémon property from the ground up as a prefab fad whose innate collectibility could be exploited across multiple media. It posited a world where kids had little pet monsters who lived in their pockets and fought each other in action-packed but nonfatal battles. There were dozens of different monsters, with new ones for every product cycle. Kids were told directly to collect them all, and when the monsters mutated they should collect them again. Through video games, comics, television shows, movies, toys and trading-card games, Pokémon reigned supreme in its home country. When Nintendo brought the phenomenon to America, Wizards anted up to translate and publish the card game.

The rest is history, at least to 8-year-olds. The Pokémon card game was a bigger success than Magic, and Wizards rode the trend with the joyless dedication of a guy building the world’s largest ball of string. There was nothing creative, charming, admirable or innovative in Pokémon except that it parted small children from their money with brutal efficiency. It inexplicably featured the dramatic story of cockfighting monsters who lived in your pants, and in Japan early episodes of the fast-paced cartoon series even caused seizures in epileptics. The entire thing was grotesque. Wizards’ complicity was a sad affirmation of just how mainstream and uninspired the company had become.

As if to shovel the final scoop of dirt on the company’s creative casket, Peter sold Wizards to lumbering toy conglomerate Hasbro at the height of the Pokémon craze. Several of the original shareholders became millionaires. In any reasonable world, this would be considered a triumph. But Peter founded Wizards to be an unreasonable world where out-of-the-box creativity would trump old-school corporate pragmatism — and then he sent that world spinning off into the void like the hapless crew of “Space: 1999.”

Fittingly enough, that was the year Peter sold the company.

The Hasbro buyout completed the process that had begun that morning on the steps of the ski lodge, and by the end of 2000 not even Peter could still pretend that Wizards was a company he wanted to work at anymore. When Hasbro executives sold the computer-gaming rights to Wizards’ products out from under the company, Peter resigned.

That doesn’t make this a sob story, of course. Peter is now a wealthy man, and spends his ample free time rock climbing, snowboarding and going to dance clubs. He got a divorce and a terrific girlfriend. He built Wizards into a mainstream success story and retired to enjoy the fruits of his labors, and he gave a lot of geeks something fun to do besides complain about the physics of “Star Trek.”

What he did not do is change the world, create a new kind of company or build the geektopia of his dreams: three things that a lot of us signed on for seven years ago. One crucial difference between Wizards and the dot-coms the company otherwise prefigured is that Peter had his illusions shattered in private, rather than exposed as nonsense on Wall Street. He picked up the pieces, joined the real world and moved on. Amazon’s Bezos and Napster’s Shawn Fanning are unlikely to enjoy that luxury.

Although Peter now acknowledges the strait-laced responsibility a CEO has to his or her shareholders, to some extent he mourns the “different sort of company” he says Wizards could have been. He looks back on the weekend of the Truth or Swill game wistfully. “I still don’t think what we did was wrong. But society does, unfortunately.”

In recent months, the self-devouring saga of the new economy has resonated strongly with me. Wizards of the Coast was a Seattle start-up founded by a geeky, visionary founder with egalitarian ideals, a staff of young fringe types, a hot product, fame and fortune and the inevitable bitterness of dreams denied.

We did it first. I only wish we’d done it best.