Newly Discovered Letters Reveal D&D's Co-Creator Asked to be put in Charge of D&D in 1997 and it Did Not Go Well

While writing my book, Slaying the Dragon, I discovered a number of fascinating historical documents hidden from public view until now. Over the coming months, I’m going to be sharing some of these captivating documents with you. The first is a 1997 letter from D&D co-creator Dave Arneson to Wizards of the Coast CEO Peter Adkison…

In the letter, Arneson begged to be put in charge of Dungeons & Dragons. In 1997 TSR, the company that published the game, was near bankruptcy and in negotiations with Magic: The Gathering publisher Wizards of the Coast about a buyout. Years after being exiled from TSR, Arneson seized upon this moment of weakness to win something he never before had: complete control of Dungeons & Dragons.

Despite Arneson’s iconic status as Dungeons & Dragons’ co-creator, the story of his involvement with the game is largely a sad one. 

Dungeons & Dragons emerged from a night in 1973 when Dave Arneson drove from Minnesota to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin to run a game he called Blackmoor for an unemployed insurance salesman and part-time cobbler named Gary Gygax. In this game, players controlled characters exploring a dungeon. Gygax was fascinated, and asked Arneson to collaborate in publishing the rules for this game. (There are some who point to this story as evidence that Dave Arneson is the true and solitary creator of D&D, making him out to be D&D Jesus and demoting Gygax to the position of geeky St. Paul.) Since no other company would publish the game, Gygax created a company called Tactical Studies Rules or TSR to get it out into the world.

In the coming years, D&D would see exponential growth, and TSR grew with it. Gygax would become a figure of national prominence, with interviews on national television. He even got his picture in the Wall Street Journal.

Despite co-creating D&D, Arneson remained a minor figure at best. He had a brief stint as Director of Research and head of the Shipping Department at TSR. After conflicts over time off and freelancing, Arneson was stripped of his duties as Director of Research, but left in charge of shipping, a stunningly insulting move against someone who’d co-created the most radically novel cultural medium of the late 20th century. (This war between Gygax and Arneson is gorily detailed in Jon Peterson’s Game Wizards.) 

Arneson left TSR depressed and worried about his future job prospects, and hoping that TSR would continue to pay him royalties owed. He would sue TSR for royalties in 1981, and again in 1984. 

TSR mocked Arneson by taking a photo of the groundbreaking of their new headquarters, and recaptioning it as though Arneson, “who long insisted that he be a part of the TSR operation” was being “buried alive with a cask of Italian wine, under the foundation of [TSR’s] new 3.5 million dollar headquarters.” 

With such a history of naked cruelty, one can only imagine Arneson’s feelings when TSR was near death, and Wizards of the Coast appeared ready to feast on its corpse. On April 11th, 1997, before the sale of TSR was even completed, Arneson wrote a letter to Wizards’ CEO Peter Adkison to say, “I would like to run TSR for you.”

The letter is a fascinating glimpse into the mind of a man without whom D&D would have never existed. He told Adkison, “Much of TSR’s failure was there [sp] own doing” and that Arneson’s relationship with the company was “never good, through no fault of my own.” 

As for why he should be put in charge, Arneson said, he was “known and respected” in the gaming industry. He could recruit talent, and knew computers. He wrote, “I don’t have an ego problem[.] (Well not a bad one anyway)” and that no one out there had his qualifications. 

He ended with, “OK Peter that’s the pitch. Please give me a call to discuss my proposal.”

Arneson’s yearning still bleeds from the page despite the decades since its composition. He was one of D&D’s founders, yet he had never had control of the game, and his time working at TSR was brief. The gap between his massive achievement and paltry recognition was so great it cannot be thought of as anything but an injustice, and here was a moment to make all that right. 

He promised Adkison, “I would do a wonderful job, for you.” 

Adkison did not call back. The letter was riddled with grammar and spelling errors, and one of the misspellings was Adkison’s own name, which Arneson rendered as “Adkins”. 

Because Adkison did not write back, on April 24th 1997, Arneson wrote Adkison again, (Misspelling his name again as well, but differently than the first time. Now the CEO of Wizards was Peter Adkinson.) In this second letter, he laid out in detail what he would do with D&D and TSR if put in charge. What would the co-creator of D&D have done with the brand in 1997? We’ll examine that in my next blog entry….

If you find me interesting, pick up my book, Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons here! It tells the never-before-heard true story of how D&D almost died in the 90s and was saved by its bitterest rival.