Steve Winter (game designer)

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Steve Winter was born on the 8th of December, 1957, in Dubuque, Iowa, with his heart set on becoming a journalist. He covered murders, presidential campaign stops, and the Mass Transit Board for the Peoria Journal-Star before a single classified ad changed the direction of his life entirely. That ad, buried in the campus newsletter he was proofreading at Iowa State University, announced a meeting of the Iowa State Gamers. What happened next drew Winter away from daily newspapers and into the world of Dungeons and Dragons, where he would spend decades as a designer, editor, coordinator, and creative director. The questions worth asking are how a journalism major ended up shaping some of the most recognizable products in tabletop gaming history, what he actually built during those years at TSR and Wizards of the Coast, and what it means to love a game deeply enough to make it your profession.

• 2. From Tobruk to Tolkien

  ›

  In 1978, Winter was working part-time at a department store in Ames, Iowa, when he came across a few wargames in the store's small games section. He bought The Russian Campaign by Avalon Hill first, but it was the next purchase that he later described as the one that changed his life. "I played it to death," he said of Tobruk, a wargame that pulled him deeper into the hobby than he had expected to go. Before wargames, it was fantasy literature that had opened his imagination. A nun at his Catholic high school had introduced him to the works of J. R. R. Tolkien, redirecting him away from historical novels and military history. He read all the fantasy he could find for years afterward, though he admitted that very little of it matched what drew him to Tolkien: a particular sense of humor and style that he could not find replicated elsewhere. Science fiction also occupied his reading hours throughout this period. The classified ad for the Iowa State Gamers arrived at exactly the right moment. Winter went to the next meeting and was introduced to D&D, after which he played all day every Saturday. The newspaper, though, remained his primary commitment. He was majoring in journalism and working on the campus newsletter, which he noted was the seventh largest daily newspaper in Iowa.

• 3. The Road to Lake Geneva

  ›

  After graduating, Winter landed a job as a city desk reporter at the Peoria Journal-Star in Illinois. His first night on the job, he covered the first murder in Peoria in over a year. He also reported on Ronald Reagan's final campaign appearance of 1980. The position, however, was temporary: he had been substituting for a woman on maternity leave, and when she returned, he was laid off. One afternoon in a Peoria hobby shop, he picked up an issue of Dragon Magazine and found a notice that TSR was looking for editors. He sent his resume and earned an interview in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. The journey proved eventful. On his first trip, his car broke down before he arrived and he had to call and postpone. The second trip went smoothly. On the third, his car broke down again, but he was within five miles of Lake Geneva and was able to get it towed in. He made it to the interview. Winter joined TSR in May 1981 as a Games Editor, trading the reporter's notebook for a role that combined his journalism training with the games he had spent years playing.

• 4. Building the Catalog

  ›

  As a Games Editor at TSR, Winter's credits accumulated quickly. He edited both Star Frontiers boxed games, the Gangbusters games, the 1983 World of Greyhawk revision, and the Top Secret Companion. By 1984, he had been promoted to Manager of Game Editors. Even with management duties, he kept working directly on projects, including editing half of Oriental Adventures. He and Jeff Grubb designed the Marvel Super Heroes RPG together. His work as a designer spanned an impressive range: Ruins of Adventure, The Complete Psionics Handbook, the third edition version of Monster Manual II, and Lords of Madness all carry his name. He also designed and developed Sniper Patrol for SPI, a game that combined and expanded the older Sniper and Patrol games. Winter, alongside Jim Ward, David Cook, and Mike Breault, co-wrote the adventure scenario that was later adapted into the computer game Pool of Radiance. He wrote a booklet called "The Art of Three-Dimensional Gaming" for the Battlesystem Fantasy Combat Supplement, and ran annual miniatures events at Gen Con, including the Car Wars series known as the "Lake Geneva Death Rally." After TSR was folded into Wizards of the Coast, Winter continued his work, eventually serving as a producer for the D&D and D&D Miniatures websites. He left Wizards of the Coast on the 14th of December, 2011.

• 5. Writing and Partnership

  ›

  In September 1985, Winter married Mary Kirchoff, who had been a member of Dragon magazine's editorial staff and the editor of the Polyhedron Newszine. The two shared professional lives as well as personal ones. Winter co-wrote the Dragonlance novel Wanderlust with Kirchoff, a collaboration that crossed the boundary between game design and fiction. The couple had an Irish setter named Hannibal. Kirchoff's presence on Dragon magazine's editorial staff placed her at the center of TSR's publishing world during the same years Winter was rising through the company's game design ranks, which makes their partnership a thread that runs through both the creative and personal history of that era at TSR.