Down and Out in Lake Geneva

In 1994, I was living in Colorado. I had been working as a freelance game designer and was thinking about leaving that field and getting into advertising because, although I was making a pretty good money, it didn't look like it would last. My two main sources of work, Iron Crown Enterprises (for whom I had worked full time a few years previous) and TSR were making noises about needing to cut back on freelance work and do more game design in-house. Whatever. That's the cycle of this industry. Companies can never make up their minds about freelance versus in-house writing. On the one hand, freelancers are cheap because you don't pay overhead or insurance for them. On the other hand, it's easier for a company to keep tighter control over its writers and editors if they're sitting right there in the office.

Anyway, I was sort of okay with that. I'd been doing this game thing for six years already (starting while I was still in college, writing for ICE), and I was really happy with Colorado. My best friend, Bruce Cordell, lived not far away and we gamed and hung out a lot.

Then, I got a phone call from Tim Brown, director of Creative Services at TSR. He wanted to fly me up to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, for an interview. Now, I had heard all sorts of bad things about TSR. The industry outside of TSR looked upon that behemoth as the "evil empire."The designers and editors there, we all had heard, were overworked drones forced to write what their evil corporate masters told them to write. No creativity, lots of harsh structure, bleak little offices -- like something out of the movie Brazil.

Plus, I personally was not thrilled with TSR. I had been writing for the previous 15 months on Marvel Super Heroes products, and then they canceled the game. Fifteen months of work! Poof! Gone. Never to see the light of day. (A character book, a "gritty, street-level"supplement, and a huge boxed set about Marvel space -- all pretty cool, I thought.) I got paid for all of it, which was something, but it hurt not to have it ever come out. To make it up to me, they immediately gave me a new assignment: a Gamma World adventure. You know what's coming next, right?

Bam! They canceled Gamma World. I was not happy. In retrospect, I had every right not to be. This long period with no published credits really hurt my career. No one inside TSR -- or among TSR's fans -- knew who I was, even though I'd been working for the company for a long time.

Nevertheless, I took Mr. Brown up on his offer. Why? Because I wanted a free trip to Lake Geneva to see the fabled TSR offices. See, even though professionally I was not a TSR fan, and I didn't care for or play much 2nd Edition D&D, I was a big D&D goob at heart. I'd been a Gary Gygax fan like everyone else. I'd loved and played and replayed all the 1st Edition classics. I wanted to see where all that started. Plus, it was free.

So, on a cold January day I flew up to Milwaukee, which is an hour's drive from TSR's headquarters. My plane was late because of a terrible ice storm, so by the time I got there, I had only a couple of hours before I had to turn around and fly back. The office building was not what I expected. Just a simple, two-story brick building with an attached warehouse. Nice, but nothing special -- except for a sign out front with an old TSR logo. I met Tim Brown, whose name I knew more from Game Designer's Workshop products than TSR products, although Tim was one of the main creative forces behind Dark Sun (I wasn't a Dark Sun fan at the time.)

Bruce Nesmith, a designer who did a lot of great work on early Ravenloft stuff, showed me around. Offices, employee lounge, warehouse… turns out the place used to be a Q-Tip factory. So far, not so good. The offices -- that is to say, the cubicles -- were just a little on the dark and dingy side. Still, they were filled with fantasy artwork and toys and stuff. Especially Zeb Cook's office -- more little Japanese robots than I knew existed, crammed into one messy cubicle. Zeb -- the lead designer of 2nd Edition AD&D -- and I knew each other from conventions, and he was probably a part of the reason I'd been asked to this interview in the first place. A good guy, and he had the place wrapped around his little finger. Zeb came and left when he wanted, said and did what he wanted -- he was the rock star of TSR, if there was one.

Anyway, so they take me into this little room with a bunch of the managers. (I'd tell you their names but, sadly, you probably wouldn't know them unless you paid close attention to TSR products in the early- to mid-nineties. None of them have worked for the company for years.) This is the part I'd been dreading. See, I'd heard about the infamous TSR Designer Interview. My friend Kevin from ICE had been through this a year or two earlier. Grueling game design questions, and then they put in a little room with a typewriter -- a TYPEWRITER, for God's sake -- and make you write a little encounter in an hour. On the spot. Based on something that they give you, so you can't prepare for it. This is like the bar exam for game designers.

All this for a job I didn't even want.

Next: Part 2 of "Down and Out in Lake Geneva." Will Monte get the job? Wait --you already know the answer to that, don't you?