Death to the Minotaur

Mon, 26 Mar 2001 20:30:00 +0000

The morning after the Truth or Swill game, I rose groggily and wandered around. As I walked through the lodge I interrupted Peter, Carrie's sister, Lisa (a vice president at Wizards of the Coast), and Lisa's boyfriend, Vic (also an employee, of course). Lisa and Vic were dressing down Peter over his involvement in the game, an occurrence that I naively thought had been a fine thing. The room was full of tension and Peter was both angry and defensive. I beat a hasty retreat.

As we packed up to leave a little later I found Peter sitting, morose, on the front steps of the lodge. I sat down next to him in silence for a while. Finally, he spoke:

"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.

Death to the Minotaur

Fri, 23 Mar 2001 17:30:00 +0000

They cut off the Minotaur's head in February. On the scruffy stretch of street known as "the Ave" in Seattle's University District, Wizards of the Coast shut down its flagship gaming center. For years the center had been a Mecca to players of fantasy card games like Magic: The Gathering and role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons, both of which Wizards published. A trippy monument to all things gooberish, the Wizards gaming hall had been planned by frothing geek executives, financed with an exorbitant bankroll and decked out in a style somewhere between Chuck E. Cheese and the Rainforest Cafe.

It included a gaming store, complete with life-size statues of characters from "Star Wars" and Magic; a video arcade populated by panhandling street kids who looked like extras from "Blade Runner"; a virtual reality gaming area with climb-in cockpit pods for networked giant robot battles; a Planet Hollywood-style restaurant, Dalmuti's, decorated in a gaming theme; and in the massive basement, a sort of community center for gamers stocked with tables, chairs and the kind of plush curtains and heraldic banners suited to an Errol Flynn movie -- or dinner with the kids at Medieval Times. In this subterranean paradise Wizards hosted a steady stream of card game tournaments and other events, including Microsoft's 1998 Age of Empires computer game championships.

Salon.com > John Tynes

Death to the Minotaur

Death to the Minotaur