What's up with the Zeb Cook hatred?

[Nagora]

From what Tim Kask said at NTRPG Con a couple of months ago, this notion that early 1970s TSR was some kind of dream factory of guys with a devotion to "art" or "mission" is nonsense. They were a bunch of guys taking a stab at turning their passion into a paycheck that would allow them to have fun while paying the bills. Anything more is romantic nonsense. Several of the other early TSR guys in the room confirmed this.

Well, romantic or not, I think it's significent that the passion and the pay-cheque are two separate issues. Generally, that's when you get the best work. Passion for the pay-cheque is usually the kiss of death for art and/or greatness.

I think you had to be there to know the full extent of the psychology involved here. Sorry if that sounds like a cop-out.

Not at all. I've walked out of companies going that way but I never had kids, and I can't deny that part of the reason is that I know having kids forces compromises I'd not be happy to live with.

[Random]

*Gasp* Gene, I own eight of those books!

Thanks for sharing, Mike. This has been really educational (in a nerdy hobby sort of way).

And on topic, I am actually glad that Zeb didn't totally screw up the AD&D game, as it was still enough to capture my 8 year-old imagination, though I wish there had been a listing of inspirational literature as had appeared in earlier publications.

Oh, and whoever was in charge of the Player's Option books, I hate you. We probably wasted countless hours of good playing time just trying to decide what all optional rules would be best to use, only to find out that most of them sucked.

[TRP]

If I caught the same "error" as you did, my first stop would have been EGG, not the legal department.

Why? By all accounts, Gary was not the supervisor on this project, was not involved in writing any of the final content and I very much doubt that Gary was in the habit of drafting the copyright statements of the books that TSR published (even the ones he was lead author for). It seems perfectly reasonable to me that, if an editor finds a potential mistake in the legal statements of a book, he would take that issue to the people responsible for drafting the legal statements.

Given Gary's lack of involvement with the OA project, it seems extremely UNreasonable for an editor to take that particular mistake to him as a first step (or any step for that matter).

Maybe I should have included the following snippet as well.

The book went from the editor (me) into typesetting with the standard legal page. When it came back from typesetting, Gary had somehow gotten ahold of it and had changed the copyright.

From the way this reads, Mike knew that Gary had changed it.

Well, from a legal perspective, you may be correct bpom, and especially so, if you do indeed consider the game creator and company founder as "just another employee."

[blackprinceofmuncie]

Maybe I should have included the following snippet as well.

The book went from the editor (me) into typesetting with the standard legal page. When it came back from typesetting, Gary had somehow gotten ahold of it and had changed the copyright.

From the way this reads, Mike knew that Gary had changed it.

I can see how that one sentence, taken out of context from the original post, might give that impression. However, I gathered from this later statement in Mike's post (underscoring = mine)...

I brought the page to the legal dept., said that someone had changed the copyright and did they know of and OK it?

That Mike didn't know who had made the changes until after he already brought the change to the attention of the legal dept. My interpretation was that the sentence you quote was written with the benefit of hindsight, not that Mike immediately knew who had made the change and why.

Hopefully, Mike will enlighten us as to who is mistaken in their interpretation.

[Zotster]

I'm getting a little overwhelmed here with responding (mostly my fault for being too verbose) so please bear with me if it takes me longer to reply. I'm not deliberately ignoring anyone.

Zot, I don't think you truly catch what Foster is saying in the quoted text. I don't see anywhere in Foster's post where he addresses any legalities. Surely, you're not equating "morality" with "legality". I'm sure anyone here, including yourself, could cite many examples where a thing may be be legal, but not moral.

I do understand what you guys are all talking about the moral thing here. I understand the fans' desire for a creator to have or regain control over his creation. I do get that. But (and I may just tick you and others off here) I guess I'm basically ignoring it because I feel it's not relevant. Hear me out, please. TSR was more than Gary, as you know, it was at times 300+ people plus their families. And I totally get that we all owed our jobs to Gary. But it was past the point where the creation outgrew the creator, if that makes sense.

Gary essentially sold his creation to TSR by taking their money while he worked on AD&D. He could have (maybe) held out for a contract that stated he retained rights to his creation. This didn't happen and I wasn't there so I don't know why. Sometimes you just don't have that leverage. If he'd done that, all power to him and congratualtions and my best wishes. The thing is, millions of people do what Gary did. You create something for a company and unless you have a contract stating otherwise, it belongs to the company. Gary knew that. When he tried to take it back, regardless of reasons, I consider that immoral. It was no longer his to take back, he sold it. Personally, I am all for artist rights, but I come down on the side of the greater good in this case. (In Jim Ward's case, he was able to get MA back because the owner no longer wanted it. Good for him and I wish him well with it.)

You and I can both bemoan the fate of the guy who sold Monopoly for $100 or whatever it was and then saw it make millions upon millions of dollars. Bet he really wanted that IP back, don't you? I wish he had gotten it back ot been able to get some % of the royalties. I know that Gary got royalties off AD&D, millions of dollars worth over the years, so he actually had it vastly better than the guy who invented Monopoly.

Also, I'm not sure that you Grok just how dismissive you're coming off when it comes to EGG. To repeatedly dismiss a creator, or co-creator if you like, as legally "just another employee" comes across as .. well.. bad taste. I hold the same respect for a Wozniak. I'd also cheer on any creator that I respected that attempted to regain control of his vision. If I caught the same "error" as you did, my first stop would have been EGG, not the legal department.

The "just another employee" statement was made not to demean his contributions but to point out that he, like all the other TSR employees who helped create AD&D, didn't have any right to the copyright.

Personally I too would cheer on any creator who wanted to take back the rights to his creation the way Jim Ward did with MA. I don't know the facts, but I assume Jim approached WotC or Hasbro, asked for the rights, negotiated, and paid something for those rights. And he got them because the property was basically worthless to the current owner. Good work all around, I love it.

You'll hate this, but let's compare what Gary did to what Jim did. First of all, AD&D was immensely valuable to TSR, it was the foundation of the company; no AD&D, no TSR. Gary did not approach the owners of TSR and discuss regaining the rights to AD&D. (Well, I assume he probably did at many points but was turned down every time.) So Gary used his current position as president to somehow (I don't know how) get the copyright notice changed to list himself (I think it said EGG, Inc) as the copyright owner. He did this knowing, better than I in all likelihood, that if this had been published it would have cause huge turmoil, lawsuits, and basically the shutting down of TSR. Maybe that was what he wanted -- TSR folds up and he has a better chance of getting ahold of the copyright. I don't know if he thought things through to that conclusion, but the end result would have been 100+ people and families with no jobs.

Some of you folks have talked about not having any respect for the people who would work on 2e, well the above actions are much, much worse, IMO. No excuse for such callous disregard for the well-being of hundreds of other people.

Really? The legal dept first? You didn't even attempt to approach Gary about it first? I suppose you could argue that you didn't *have* to go that route, and you'd be right. However, in the environment where I work, if somebody has a problem with something they usually (not always grant you, because some people just plain have ill-feelings towards some other people) bring the issue to that person first, and then maybe they'll take a more official route if they are not satisfied. The legal dept thing comes across as a "gotcha Gary!" rather than an honest attempt to clear up something with which you disagreed.

Oh, dude, there was no way. I worked there five years and Gary was barely around even before he was removed. When he was around, there was generally turmoil. There was an established protocol for all legal questions editors had -- you went to the paralegal who ensured that all the legal niceties were followed and you pointed out to her your question. It was a legal issue and I let the legal department handle it. I also didn't know where it came from. The file went from me to the typesetters and then something came out that I hadn't put in there. I went to legal not in a fury of righteous indignation, but in confusion. I handed the galley page to the paralegal and asked if this was correct, was this the new copyright notice for our AD&D products. She looked at it, asked me if I'd written it that way and when I said no, she leaped up and brought it into her boss, the VP of legal. Her boss tore out of her office and headed for Gary's. I asked the paralegal what was going on and was told that Gary had changed the notice.

Your opinion seems weak for the man that created the job you held then, and, assuming that you're involved in any way now with CRPGs, likely even the job(s) you hold today. Sorry, I know you're in computer gaming now, I'm just not up on exactly what. I play computer games, but not CRPGs as a rule.

I don't work on CRPGs, mostly FPSs (shooters). Red Faction: Guerrilla (recently out) and Wolfenstein (coming out this month) are the latest two games I worked on.

I'm going to put you on the spot. Maybe it's fair, but likely it's not. When you worked at TSR, did you:

1) Respect Gary as a person?
2) Respect Gary as a game creator/designer?

By "respect", I don't mean starry-eyed adulation, but just a basic, mature "esteem for or a sense of the worth" for what he had done, and probably more importantly what he was doing, or attempting to do, while you worked there.

No, this is fine and these are reasonable questions to ask. My answers are that I did not respect Gary as a person but I did respect him greatly as a game designer. Furthermore, I respect the hell out of how good he was with fans -- I never saw him anything but pleasant and very willing to give of his time.

The reasons I didn't like him as a person are several and are very subjective, as you'd expect. First of all, I thought he was very egotistical. Some people have no trouble dealing with people like that but they really bother me, in just about any industry. It's something I should let go of but can't seem to. The opulence of his office bothered me too. His secretary (more on her below) sat behind what was said to be a $25,000 antique cherrywood desk, the fixtures in his private bathroom did indeed seem to be gold-plated (and yes, I saw them) -- that sort of "monument to my ego" stuff really bothers me. Maybe it wouldn't bother most people, but you're asking why I didn't like him personally and maybe my reasons don't make sense to you.

This next bit is gossip and you are free to dismiss it as such. But I saw enough personally and heard enough from sources I consider reliable that it really bothered me. So here is the rumor: Gary, a married man with children, cheated on his wife with his secretary, divorced his wife, and then married his secretary. There was enough to this rumor (in addition to the fact of Gary divorcing his wife of many years to marry his secretary) that I believe it and it really lowered my opinion of him, as a person (not as a creator). It especially bothers me when someone who has kids does something like this (cheating), as it seems a very selfish thing to do to one's family.

Unlike the cocaine allegations, which I never saw any evidence of, I saw plenty of reasons to believe the cheating allegations. As I said, this is technically unproven but there's a hell of a lot of smoke for there not to be a fire.

So, those are the reasons I can think of now why I didn't like him as a person. He basically set my teeth on edge, completely a subjective reaction. I understand why his friends and fans liked him, as he was very personable and I believe loyal to his friends. He did create the company that gave me a job and he did have a big part in creating a game that I loved, so all props to him as a creative individual.

[TRP]

Perhaps I'm wrong in my assumption, but I gathered from the context of that comment in Mike's post that he wasn't aware of who changed the legal page until after he had already shown it to legal.

Unh.. if you're right, then I'm off base.

[Gentlegamer]

From Mike's last post it seems to me that he doesn't know the history of TSR and its relationship to Gary.

[T. Foster]

Some additional context tying in to Mike's most recent post regarding how the employees at TSR viewed EGG and the Blumes (note: essentially no distinction being drawn between them), from Grognardia's interview with Kevin Hendryx (who worked at TSR a couple years earlier):

Do you recall why this reorganization occurred? Was this part of TSR's phenomenal growth in the early 80s or was it the result of other internal pressures within the company?

We were not privy to TSR's executive management decisions, except what we were told or what was rumored, so in a way I can't answer this except from my own perspective, and according to what we believed at the time or might have learned later. Tensions and tempers ran hot during that period. Product Development was full of a bunch of mainly younger, intense guys bursting with energy and enthusiasm; above us were more and more non-gamer business and marketing men, who seemed to have the ear of the executives and whose priorities were not our own.

The conflict between these attitudes and expectations led to unpleasant situations at TSR beginning in mid-1981 and recurring at regular intervals thereafter, as far as I am aware. The company would periodically swell with new staff, then constrict when times grew lean. People were summarily fired or laid off at the whim of management. The problems in early 1981, however, were not financial, but philosophical. In those days, cronyism was rampant at TSR, at every level -- old friends, in-laws, and whole families dominated entire divisions. Some factions were more powerful or better connected than others.

By and large, the creative wing wasn't involved in the ego games and power struggles -- Product Development was physically isolated at that time, in our own building downtown along with the Dungeon Hobby Shop and Dungeon Distributors and the RPGA, and the managers were on the outskirts of town in the new building and warehouse. We didn't marry or get born into our jobs. We had no little hubris about being the "content providers" as it were, while the rest were doing whatever it was they did. We often felt that the Blumes and Gygaxes and their associates, like Will Neibling, were arrogant and greedy, were in over their heads as businessmen, and treated the company and its employees like NPCs in a big game they were playing.

Tremendous growth and inflows of cash made it possible to grow both responsibly and irresponsibly. We had a large design and art staff that was the envy of smaller publishers. We weren't dependent on the vagaries of freelance submissions; we could generate quality products completely in-house, but at the same time, we weren't paid particularly well and TSR insisted on owning all rights to everything we produced, as opposed to honoring earlier agreements to pay royalties for in-house productions. This led to many confrontations, as you'd expect, especially when the serfs saw the executives buying big houses and fancy automobiles or other “bling.”

The sales and marketing honchos at the company were interested in pursuing licensing agreements and other aspects of mainstream game publishing, like the big boys at Mattel or Parker Brothers or Hasbro might do, which meant branching into children's games à la Fantasy Forest (Candyland with dragons) and movie tie-ins like Escape from New York. Not all the design staff was interested in working on such things; we all preferred to explore original concepts or work within the hobby game arena. Some of the guys were more vocal about their disinclination to toe the company line than others, and ultimately some of the big bosses decided to crack down and force the issue. Maybe they'd been taking management courses and wanted to do things the way other companies did.

So we were all obliged to "reapply" for our jobs in a formal sense -- this was April 1981 -- and the people in charge of the process used this as an excuse to abruptly terminate some of the troublemakers for having bad attitudes. This led to some others quitting in protest. And that was the first of the infamous TSR purges. (I recall Jim Roslof returning from a weekend out of town to discover he was alone in the art deptartment, basically.) It put the rest of us on alert as to what we could expect in the future, so those of us who had been spared but were extremely upset and unhappy at the turn of events began to make plans to leave.

By the end of that summer, more of us were gone, including me. TSR continued to make new hires, replaced those who left, and was a very different place by the end of the year. We who were gone referred to ourselves as the "Terminati" and that bygone era as the "Golden Age" in our wishful way. It was a short period of time, but very intense. To this day, I've never had such an engaging job or worked with more creative and inspiring people. Some of the close bonds formed then have continued, and to this day I feel great kinship with all those with whom I worked in Lake Geneva, even our then-antagonists. And requiescant in pace.

[Zotster]

That Mike didn't know who had made the changes until after he already brought the change to the attention of the legal dept. My interpretation was that the sentence you quote was written with the benefit of hindsight, not that Mike immediately knew who had made the change and why.

Hopefully, Mike will enlighten us as to who is mistaken in their interpretation.

You are correct, but I totally see how TRP interpreted it the way he did. I didn't know who'd changed it until the paralegal told me. Until she did, I wondered if maybe the legal department had changed it. It was a confusing time.

[geneweigel]

I guess you, Mike Breault, may fall way short of the range of any spell of Endless Ire but Mr Cook most certainly was involved in the hostile takeover and had the most and got the most to gain.

You can't change reality with a POV check. Thats what happened.

Now whatever the hearsay "tittilating" part thats been going around is, I can't confirm that but at the core he did wrong by the fans in his business tactics. A man whose value as a designer was only as a trusted hand for Mr Gygax. Williams was not dumb for targetting him as a literal "Brutus", any fan could have told you that Zeb's stuff was hollow at the core and that he was heavily associated with Gary's stuff around that mid-80's period (Common knowledge for anybody who can read credits or Dragon magazine.). Zeb can't write compellingly but he's a good relay and he must have known that (He literally cut and pasted 2e where he could but what he did write its just across so weak and as filler.). However, still... there is the actual bile about Gygax in a product that he designed. Greyhawk Wars (At the end of a fictional history he used names popularly associated with people to slant Gary. NOTE: This product has the same mentality that you maintain, that the TSR leftovers were some form of legalized heroes.).

To me, that was the thing that put Zeb in the penalty box combined with his lack of steam slowly destroying the game's versatility and literally condeming it to a fate as a "backwards game for backwards people".

You can't blame me for thinking that "Zeb" was the main problem with why products lost their luster.

Who is responsible? You? Then point. Ultimately, you cannot blame Gary for your era's utter "lack".

[Zotster]

Some additional context tying in to Mike's most recent post regarding how the employees at TSR viewed EGG and the Blumes (note: essentially no distinction being drawn between them), from Grognardia's interview with Kevin Hendryx (who worked at TSR a couple years earlier):

Very interesting reading, from someone I didn't know at all.

One comment I'd like to make, which might help explain why he lumped Gary in with the Blumes, was that both sides practiced rampant nepotism. When I started at TSR, I believe there were as many as 10 Blumes and 4-6 Gygaxes on the payroll. I have no idea who the other Blumes were, aside from Kevin and Brian, and I don't remember all the Gygaxes (Gary's daughter Heidi and her husband [might have been her fiance when I started] were there, as well as one of Gary's sons). Reading Kevin's quotes, that's the sense that I think he was lumping the Blumes in with Gary. I don't think he was doing it in any other sense.

[Zotster]

From Mike's last post it seems to me that he doesn't know the history of TSR and its relationship to Gary.

Always happy to be enlightened.

[Zotster]

I guess you, Mike Breault, may fall way short of the range of any spell of Endless Ire but Mr Cook most certainly was involved in the hostile takeover and had the most and got the most to gain.

Maybe I've been misunderstanding what you're saying, Gene. Are you talking about the corporate takeover, the change in power/ownership that occurred at TSR or the "takeover" of AD&D that occurred when going from 1e to 2e? I've been assuming you've been tying Zeb in with all the power plays that went on, but if all you're saying is you resent the direction he took AD&D in with 2e, then I am happy to concede that you're welcome to that opinion. It's the part about Zeb having some hand in pushing Gary out that I've been objecting to, and perhaps misinterpreting your meaning.

Mike

[Nagora]

You and I can both bemoan the fate of the guy who sold Monopoly for $100 or whatever it was and then saw it make millions upon millions of dollars. Bet he really wanted that IP back, don't you? I wish he had gotten it back ot been able to get some % of the royalties. I know that Gary got royalties off AD&D, millions of dollars worth over the years, so he actually had it vastly better than the guy who invented Monopoly

Just to be pedantic, and because it touches on some of the IP issues here: Monopoly was invented by a group of Quakers who essentially released it to the public domain as an educational aid (demonstrating the evils of property ownership - everyone in the game ends up bankrupt except one fat landlord). Barrow copied the game right down to the spelling mistakes and took it to Parker Brothers who then attempted to buy up all copies of the original and supress them. The Quakers never sued because the whole point of the exercise was to show how evil springs from what people will do to each other in order to obtain ownership of things; a fact that Parker Bros had amply demonstrated and which TSR later underlined. There is some wry amusement to be had from the fact that Parker Bros and TSR's "IP" are now both controled by Hasbro.

[Dwayanu]

On Monopoly: Maybe the "inventor" sold it for $100 ... but it looks as if he first flat-out stole it from the creators of The Landlord Game.

Then there's the guy who wrote an operating system he unknowingly sold to the guys who had promised to deliver an OS to IBM -- the guys called Microsoft.

Gary apparently went in with his eyes open, and I think there's a good reason so many successful creators take an unromantic view of their work. Their success is due to the combination of a solid work ethic and a willingness to accept risks. Maybe to throw some ruthless blows, too.

It's not a scientific survey, and I don't know how much it applies here, but I've seen what seems a high frequency among entrepreneurs of making a habit of charitable giving. That's a practice that steels one to accept that one is not always going to turn a profit, to leave room in one's assessment for what one can afford to lay on the line with no guarantees.

The end of his association with TSR and AD&D was just the end of a phase in Gary's life, with plenty more to do. And he went out and did it.