Wizards of the Coast

Wizards of the Coast
Year Established	1990
Notable Games	Magic: The Gathering, Dungeons and Dragons
Website	http://www.wizards.com

Wizards of the Coast, like so many luminous icons of the tabletop industry, was founded in a dingy basement in the rainy city of Seattle in 1990. Originally, they developed Magic the Gathering, and, after using their patents on various cardgame staples like "tapping" and "counters" to strangle literally every other competitor but Legend of the Five Rings out of business, they made so much goddamn money on the sucker's market that is the CCG scene that they were able to fulfill every nerd's dream of buying the dying Dungeons and Dragons property out from under Lorraine Williams, then revitalizing it with its most popular edition. Since then, they've been themselves bought out by the cold, emotionless, alien suits at Hasbro, but in recent times the corporation has adopted a more "hand-off" approach to Wizards, to mutual benefit.

They are a source of civilized and respectful debate on /tg/, but while the old guard will probably never forgive them for changing literally anything about the game from the Chainmail days, general consensus is that, as evil megacorporations in the tabletop business go, they really could be much worse.

Early History: It's Magic! Oooo-oooh!

Wizards started out as a small-time game publisher, releasing new editions of defunct old niche games and small dribbles of their own material. They'd probably have gone the route of Iron Crown Enterprises or be languishing in obscurity today, if not for a stroke of good luck. Some math major with an eye towards game design walked into their office and pitched a board game to them. They liked it, but they didn't have the cash to produce it, so they asked him to come up with something cheaper to produce, something portable and quick to play. Well, to make a long story short, he went home, ran some numbers, and the rest is history.

Magic: The Gathering was (and, if you're into the Skinner Box of CCGs, still is) a damn fine collectible card game, the first commercially successful one of its kind in the world... which isn't actually that impressive, considering the only other CCG at that point was a baseball card game from the early 1900s. Still, it started an industry, won shitloads of game-design awards, and led to Wizards using its patents on various basic card game mechanics ("tapping," counters, etc.) to ruthlessly crush all competitors. Sometimes, they were justified in protecting their IP against hacks and shovelware imitators. Sometimes, they just went after people they didn't like. Let's just say there's a reason L5R used to make you lose points if you accidentally said "tap" instead of "bow."

It also made them more money than can easily be imagined, not least because the 90s was the age of know-nothing idiots speculating on "nerd shit," a trend started in the comic-book industry. (Humorously, the cards from this time have sometimes ended up being more valuable than the pointless comics bubble ever would be.) Rather than blowing it all on hookers and blow, in the tradition of the 80's, they funneled it back into their RPG business, buying up various old games and refurbishing them, including Ars Magica from fellow swaggering new kid on the block White Wolf. Most of them had enjoyed only moderate success at best, not least because the market then was smaller than it had ever been following the fundamentalist-o-caust of the 80's purge and the company was putting its fingers into too many pies and failing to support all its games, but eventually, they managed to land the biggest fish of all.

And so, my lord became a king by his own hand...

As a cash-strapped and internal-politics-crippled TSR was folding and dying, Wizards bought them and all their stuff, including the famous and venerable Dungeons and Dragons property, for a paltry $25 million. They gave all the old TSR guys jobs, called off the lawyers and openly allowed fans to release stuff for poorly-selling but much-beloved campaign settings, and put various designers from TSR to work building the most popular and successful edition of D&D ever. Then paid to do it again when it needed a shitload of patching, leading to the silliest D&D edition name of all time (3.5). They also held a contest to design a setting that was weird and new for the new edition, ultimately settling on Keith Baker's Eberron.

Along with that edition, they put out the Open Gaming License, offering free reign for other companies to use their rules and produce supplements. While this had the unfortunate side effect of sometimes putting their tacit approval on complete fail, it is generally held to be one of their smartest and most fan-friendly moves ever, generating huge amounts of content for their game without paying a dime for it. Whether you want uber-minimalism, hard sci-fi, or erotically-charged sexventures, you can generally find it somewhere in the library of OGL content, in varying degrees of quality.

As the decade wound down, they also got the license to make a CCG for Pokémon, and while we scoff now, it was a pretty good game that wasn't a complete Magic rip-off probably made them about as much money as Magic for a while there. The Pokémon craze was at its height, and children everywhere begged money off their parents, worked menial lemonade-stand jobs, and, in some truly fail-tastic cases, murdered each other in cold blood for the next sweet, sweet hit of Skinner Box fever.

The Great Mistake

At the turn of the millenium, terrible, alien intelligences examined our realm of existence. With minds too different from ours to comprehend, and the cold, unfeeling calculations of inhuman minds, they reached out their slick black tentacles into our plane and acquired Wizards of the Coast. They also paid nearly ten times as much for the privilege as Wizards spent for TSR, so suck it fanboys!

What happened next is hard to conclusively prove, since nobody involved wants to stop working in the business forever by getting a rep as a fuckin' snitch, but over the course of a decade, most of Wizards' upper management was quietly replaced. Various minor aspects of the property, like GenCon and the Dragon and Dungeon magazines were portioned off and outsourced to other producers (notably, Paizo). Whether this was the fault of Wizards, a company run by enthusiasts for enthusiasts with a history of mediocre business sense, or Hasbro is probably never going to be conclusively proven. Eventually, the decision was made to build an entirely new edition of Dungeons & Dragons.

In theory, this wasn't necessarily a bad thing. 3.5 had always had its flaws (Monte Cook's traditional caster-dominance, weak martial classes, incoherent high-level play that turned into a maze of magic item abuse and extra turn stacking, etc.) and was starting to show its age. Furthermore, they decided that this edition wouldn't just be a revamp of the old, but a complete rebuilding of the entire D&D system from the ground up, intending to fix long-running problems and set a bold new direction for the future. No more would martials announce "I make a weapon attack" and throw a d20 round after round: they would have access to cool techniques and a varied playstyle just like the casters. No more would casters break the game over their knee and don their robe and wizard hat to fuck its corpse: their power would be drastically scaled back, with magic now divided into combat and ritual components.

Unfortunately, this well-intentioned and high-profile project was destined to go horribly wrong...