Wizards of the Coast is an American publisher of games, primarily based on
fantasy and science fiction themes, and formerly an operator of retail stores
for games. Originally a basement-run role-playing game publisher, the company
popularized the collectible card game genre with Magic: The Gathering in the
mid-1990s, acquired the popular Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game by
purchasing the failing company TSR, and experienced tremendous success by
publishing the licensed Pokémon Trading Card Game. The company's corporate
headquarters are located in Renton, Washington in the United States of
America. Today, Wizards of the Coast publishes
role-playing games, board games, and collectible card games. They have
received numerous awards, including several Origins Awards. The company has
been a subsidiary of Hasbro since 1999. All Wizards of the Coast stores were
closed in 2004. History
Wizards of the Coast was founded by Peter Adkison in 1990 just outside
Seattle, Washington, and its current headquarters are located in nearby
Renton. Originally the company only published role-playing games such as the
third edition of Talislanta and its own The Primal Order. The 1992 release of
The Primal Order, a supplement designed for use with any game system, brought
legal trouble with Palladium Books suing for references to Palladium's game and
system. The suit was settled in 1993. In 1991, Richard Garfield approached
Wizards of the Coast with the idea for a new board game called RoboRally, but was
turned down because the game would have been too expensive for Wizards of the
Coast to produce. Instead, Adkison asked Garfield if he could invent a game that
was both portable and quick-playing, to which Garfield agreed.
Adkison set up a new corporation, Garfield Games, to develop Richard
Garfield's collectible card game concept, originally called Manaclash,
into Magic: The Gathering. This kept the game sheltered from the legal battle
with Palladium, and Garfield Games then licensed the production and sale rights
to Wizards until the court case was settled, at which point the shell
company was shut down. Wizards debuted Magic in July 1993 at the Origins Game
Fair in Dallas. The game proved extremely popular at Gen Con in August
1993, selling out of its supply of 2.5 million cards, which had been scheduled
to last until the end of the year. The success of Magic generated revenue that
carried the company out from the handful of employees in 1993 working out of
Peter's original basement headquarters into 250 employees in its own offices in
1995. In 1994, Magic won both the Mensa Top Five mind games award and the
Origins Awards for Best Fantasy or Science Fiction Board game of 1993 and
Best Graphic Presentation of a Board game of 1993.
In 1994, Wizards began an association with The Beanstalk Group, a brand
licensing agency and consultancy, to license the Magic brand. After the
success of Magic, Wizards published RoboRally in 1994, and it soon won the
1994 Origins Awards for Best Fantasy or Science Fiction Board Game and Best
Graphic Presentation of a Board Game. Wizards also expanded its role-playing
game line by buying SLA Industries from Nightfall Games and Ars Magica from
White Wolf, Inc. in 1994. In 1995, Wizards published another card game by
Richard Garfield, The Great Dalmuti, which won the 1995 Best New Mind Game
award from Mensa. In August 1995, Wizards released Everway and then four
months later closed its roleplaying game product line. Peter Adkison explained
that the company was doing a disservice to the games with lack of support and
had lost money on all of Wizards' roleplaying game products. Also in 1995,
Wizards' annual sales passed US$65 million.
= Acquisition of TSR and Pokémon= Wizards announced the purchase of TSR,
the cash-strapped makers of Dungeons & Dragons on April 10, 1997. Wizards
acquired TSR and Five Rings Publishing Group for $25 million. Many of the
creative and professional staff of TSR relocated from Wisconsin to the Renton
area. Wizards used TSR as a brand name for a while, then retired it, allowing
the TSR trademarks to expire. Between 1997 and 1999, the company spun off
several well-loved but poorly selling campaign settings to fan groups,
focusing business primarily on the more profitable Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms
lines. In Summer 1997, Wizards revisited the
concept of a 3rd edition of Dungeons & Dragons, having first discussed it soon
after the purchase of TSR. Looking back on the decision in 2004, Adkison stated:
"Obviously, [Wizards] had a strong economic incentive for publishing a new
edition; sales for any product line tend to spike when a new edition comes out,
assuming the new edition is an improvement over the first. And given
the change in ownership we thought this would be an excellent opportunity for
WotC to 'put its stamp on D&D.'" He later "Set [the] overall design
direction" for the new edition of D&D. Wizards released the third edition of
Dungeons & Dragons in 2000, as well as the d20 System. With these releases came
the Open Game License, which allowed other companies to make use of those
systems. The new edition of the D&D game won the 2000 Origins Award for Best
Roleplaying Game. In 2002, Wizards sponsored a design contest which allowed
designers to submit their campaign worlds to Wizards, to produce an
entirely original campaign world; Wizards selected "Eberron", submitted by
Keith Baker, and its first hardcover book was released in June 2004. In 2003
Wizards released version 3.5 of Dungeons & Dragons and the d20 system. Wizards
helped to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the D&D game at Gen Con Indy 2004.
On August 2, 1997, Wizards of the Coast was granted U.S. Patent 5,662,332 on
collectible card games. In January 1999, Wizards of the Coast began publishing
the highly successful Pokémon Trading Card Game. The game proved to be very
popular, selling nearly 400,000 copies in less than six weeks, and selling 10
times better than Wizards' initial projections. There was such a high
demand for Pokémon cards that some sports card series were discontinued in
1999 because so many printers were producing Pokémon cards. The game won
the 1999 National Parenting Center's Seal of Approval.
Within a year, Wizards had sold millions of copies of the Pokémon game, and the
company released a new set that included an instructional CD-ROM. Wizards
continued to publish the game until 2003. One of Nintendo's affiliates,
Pokémon USA, had begun producing a new edition for the game before the last of
its agreements with Wizards expired September 30, and Wizards filed suit
against Nintendo the following day, October 1, 2003. The two companies
resolved their differences in December 2003 without going to court.
= Acquisition by Hasbro= Seeing the continued success of Pokémon
and Magic: The Gathering, the game and toy giant Hasbro bought Wizards of the
Coast in September 1999, for about US$325 million. Hasbro had expressed
interest in purchasing Wizards of the Coast as early as 1994, and had been
further impressed after the success of its Pokémon game. Avalon Hill was made a
division of Wizards of the Coast, in late 1999; the company had been
purchased by Hasbro in the summer of 1998.
Vince Caluori became President of Wizards of the Coast in November 1999.
As of January 1, 2001, Peter Adkison resigned from Wizards. Chuck Huebner
became President and CEO of Wizards of the Coast in June 2002, and Loren
Greenwood succeeded Huebner in these positions in April 2004. Greg Leeds
succeeded Loren Greenwood as President and CEO of Wizards of the Coast in March
2008. As of 2008, the company employs over 300 people.
In November 1999, Wizards announced that Gen Con would leave Milwaukee after the
2002 convention. Hasbro sold Origins to GAMA, and in May 2002 sold Gen Con to
Peter Adkison. Wizards also outsourced its magazines by licensing Dungeon,
Dragon, Polyhedron, and Amazing Stories to Paizo Publishing. Wizards released
the Dungeons & Dragons miniatures collectible pre-painted plastic
miniatures games in 2003, and added a licensed Star Wars line in 2004, and
through its Avalon Hill brand an Axis & Allies World War II miniatures game in
2005. Wizards of the Coast's book publishing division has produced
hundreds of titles that have sold millions of copies in over 16 languages.
After the company's great success in 1999 with Pokémon, Wizards of the Coast
acquired and expanded "The Game Keeper," a US chain of retail gaming stores,
eventually changing its name to "Wizards of the Coast", including the company's
flagship gaming center on the Ave in Seattle for several years, and its
retail stores, which were mostly in shopping malls in the US. The gaming
center was closed by March 2001 and eventually Wizards announced in December
2003 that it would close all of its stores in order to concentrate on game
design. The stores were closed in the spring of 2004.
= Recent years= In early 2006, Wizards of the Coast
filed a lawsuit against Daron Rutter, then administrator of the MTGSalvation
website. The charges stemmed from Rutter publicly posting confidential prototypes
for upcoming Magic: The Gathering card sets to the MTGSalvation forums, ten
months before the cards were to be released. Mark Rosewater explained the
outcome: "I can say that we [Wizards of the Coast] settled the lawsuit with
Rancored Elf out of court to both parties' satisfaction."
Paizo Publishing's license to produce Dragon and Dungeon magazines, which
Paizo had been publishing since it spun off from Wizards of the Coast's
periodicals department in 2002, expired in September 2007. Wizards then moved
the magazines to an online model. On June 6, 2008, Wizards released the 4th
Edition of Dungeons & Dragons, with the retail availability of a new set of core
rulebooks. Wizards began introducing 4th Edition online content in Dragon and
Dungeon magazines. 4th Edition is designed to offer more streamlined game
play, while the new rules framework intended to reduce the preparation time
needed to run a game and make the game more accessible to new players.
On April 6, 2009, Wizards of the Coast suspended all sales of its products for
the Dungeons & Dragons games in PDF format from places such as
ONEBOOKSHELF.com and its subsidiaries RPGNow.com and DRIVETHRURPG.com. This
coincides with a lawsuit brought against eight people in an attempt to prevent
future piracy of their books, and includes the recent 4th edition Dungeons
& Dragons products that were made available through these places as well
as all older editions PDFs of the game. A 5th edition of AD&D was released
during the second half of 2014. Games and products
In addition to Dungeons & Dragons, Magic: The Gathering, and Pokémon,
Wizards has produced numerous other games, including board, card, miniature,
and role-playing games. They also publish novels based on games such as
Dungeons & Dragons, Magic: The Gathering and Legend of the Five Rings.
References External links
Wizards of the Coast