Peter Adkison

• 1. Introduction

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  Peter D. Adkison grew up playing strategy games and wargames, and in 1978, a friend introduced him to Dungeons and Dragons. The game, by his own account, "blew him away." That moment planted a seed that would eventually reshape an entire industry. How does a systems analyst at Boeing, working a steady day job, end up founding one of the most consequential hobby game companies in history? How does a small startup built on a friend's offhand suggestion grow to absorb the very game that first captivated its founder? And what happens when a passionate gamer sells everything he built, only to reinvent himself again? The answers stretch from a Boeing cubicle in the 1980s all the way to a convention hall that Adkison has been attending since 1992.

• 2. Boeing to Wizards

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  Adkison earned a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Walla Walla College in 1985, and followed that with an MBA from the University of Washington. For six years after graduating, from 1985 to 1991, he worked as a systems analyst at Boeing. It was there, while holding a steady engineering job, that he began laying the groundwork for something entirely different. The name "Wizards of the Coast" had been floating around for years before the company existed. Adkison's friend Terry Campbell first suggested using it, having drawn it from a guild that one of their player characters belonged to in a role-playing campaign. In the early 1980s, Adkison had already started using the name on a self-published wargame called Castles and Conquest, designed for use alongside fantasy role-playing games. When he eventually approached his friend Ken McGlothlen about formally starting a company, the name was ready and waiting. Wizards of the Coast was officially founded on the 23rd of May 1990. The company's first project was The Primal Order, a "capstone system" written by Adkison himself, designed to work alongside any number of different role-playing game systems. It was not released until April 1992, roughly two years after the company launched.

• 3. The Card That Changed Everything

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  Richard Garfield had come to Wizards of the Coast with a board game called RoboRally, but Adkison told him it would be too expensive to produce. He asked Garfield to develop something cheaper. What Garfield brought back combined the concept of baseball cards with a card game, and in 1993 that idea reached the public as Magic: The Gathering. The collectible card game genre did not exist before Magic. Adkison's question about production costs had accidentally prompted the creation of an entirely new category of product. With Magic's success, Adkison left Boeing and began working full-time for Wizards of the Coast. The company also distributed the Pokemon trading cards, expanding its footprint in the collectible card market. Adkison's own game design sensibility ran toward systems that bridged gaps between games. The Primal Order had been built on precisely that idea, functioning as a supplement that could sit on top of existing role-playing frameworks rather than replacing them.

• 4. Acquiring TSR

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  TSR, the publisher of Dungeons and Dragons, was facing financial insolvency in 1996. Ryan Dancey of Five Rings Publishing Group arranged a deal for Adkison to step in. On the 10th of April 1997, Wizards of the Coast announced the purchase of TSR. The final price was approximately US$30 million, which included the payment of TSR's existing debts. Adkison also purchased Five Rings Publishing as part of the same arrangement. The acquisition required more than financial restructuring. TSR had damaged relationships with Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, the creators of Dungeons and Dragons, and Adkison worked to repair those ties through favorable financial and legal arrangements. He also restored working relationships with authors Margaret Weis, Tracy Hickman, and R.A. Salvatore. Inside TSR, Adkison placed Bill Slavicsek at the head of role-playing game research and development, appointed Mary Kirchoff to manage book publishing, made Lisa Stevens the brand manager for the RPGA and Greyhawk, and put Ryan Dancey over business and marketing. Adkison had already been thinking about a third edition of Dungeons and Dragons before the acquisition was even complete. He put Slavicsek in charge of the initial design team and later named Jonathan Tweet as the new project leader for third edition. The company also acquired Last Unicorn Games in July 2000, when that business ran into its own financial difficulties; Adkison had been a longtime friend of Last Unicorn's Christian Moore.

• 5. The Hasbro Sale and After

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  Hasbro purchased Wizards of the Coast in 1999. Adkison stayed on and turned his attention to a new project: a Dungeons and Dragons massively multiplayer online role-playing game, built on a design from Richard Garfield and Skaff Elias. According to game designer Ed Stark, Adkison stated his position plainly: "Look, computer gaming is the future of roleplaying. We've got to get involved in this." The project never materialized. Hasbro folded the rights to D&D computer games into Hasbro Interactive and then sold them to Infogrames, leaving Wizards unable to publish D&D games in the digital space. Adkison submitted his resignation, which became effective on the 31st of December 2000. He formally departed in January 2001, entering what he described as "semi-retirement", spending time on rock-climbing and what he called "lying around". He had been attending Gen Con since 1992, and in May 2002 he purchased the convention from Hasbro. Adkison says he has "always loved" Gen Con, and he remains its owner today. In 1999, before the sale closed, Pyramid magazine had named him one of The Millennium's Most Influential Persons, specifically in the realm of adventure gaming.

• 6. Life After Wizards

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  By 2005, Adkison was serving as CEO of Hidden City Games, publishers of Bella Sara, a collectible card game aimed at girls. By 2013, he had launched a production company called Hostile Work Environment LLC. His appetite for role-playing games never diminished. As of 2002, he was running two Dungeons and Dragons campaigns simultaneously and playing in three more. In 1981, he had created a D&D campaign called Chaldea, and as of the source material he continues to run it. His personal game preferences span well beyond the titles his companies created; he has named Magic: The Gathering, The Settlers of Catan, Robo Rally, Call of Cthulhu, Vampire: The Masquerade, Twitch, and the Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying Game among the games he enjoys. Adkison has also become an advocate for independent role-playing games, a position rooted in the same enthusiasm for the hobby he first developed as a child. The Chaldea campaign he started in 1981 stands as a reminder that for Adkison, the business of games and the love of games have never been separate things.