Twenty-Eight Years of the Best Four Days in Gaming

Friday, July 8, 2011

	Illustration by Clyde Caldwell

Has it really been 28 years already? It seems like only yesterday that my friend Rich Rydberg and I were setting up our tent at a campground in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and excitedly talking about our first Gen Con. The year was 1984, and Rich was in my AD&D group at St. Olaf College, in Northfield, Minnesota. For the previous three years, we had seen all the coverage on Gen Con in Dragon magazine and dreamed about going to the king of all conventions, but it took until 1984 for all the stars to align.

The convention wasn't very big back in those days. The Parkside gymnasium where the dealer hall was located was hot as heck. But you could see all the luminaries of gaming easily. I ran into Gary Gygax the first day I was at the con! I even got Clyde Caldwell to draw a picture of my first D&D character, and it sits on my wall here at work. The biggest discovery for Rich and me was the RPGA. Since this was our first convention, we had registered for a bunch of random AD&D games, and boy were some of them bad. We hadn't realized how good our home game was compared to some of the games we played in at the con. RPGA changed all that with great adventures run by some of the best DMs in the business!

The RPGA became the center of my Gen Con world for the next four years as the convention moved to the MECCA convention center in Milwaukee. I literally played RPGA events from early morning on Thursday until the last slot on Sunday. Frank Mentzer ran me through The Temple of Elemental Evil. I got to play in the first Oriental Adventures tournament. And slowly, I rose to the top, becoming one of the first Grand Masters and eventually Paragon players.

Now, RPGA tournaments were a lot different back then. This was before Living City, so all the tournaments were either skill challenges like the AD&D Open, or they were roleplaying-based tournaments, where you were given a random character and you had to roleplay it on the spot, and at the end of the tournament, your fellow players graded all the players at the table, with the one with the highest total winning that table!

Of course, it wasn't all RPGA. One convention, I got to play in the first public game using the AD&D Battlesystem, and Rich and my opponents were none other than Ed Greenwood of Forgotten Realms fame, and Mike Nystul, whose character created Nystul's magic aura among other things.

My RPGA years came to an abrupt end when I started my first gaming company, Lion Rampant. In 1987, we released Whimsy Cards and the highlight of my show was selling a pack to Dave Arneson. The next year, we came out with Ars Magica and it won Best Game of the Year in the RPGA Gamer's Choice Awards. I'll never forget Rich yelling at me from across the dealer hall as he raced from the RPGA breakfast banquet carrying our trophy.

	The First Wizards of the Coast Booth

The years went by and Gen Con became a business convention for me. As I entered the business side, I got to meet all of the luminaries of the industry and talk with them as peers. Gen Con was very social, with deals being talked about at the Safe House late at night. I went from Lion Rampant to White Wolf to Wizards of the Coast in the span of five years. Check out the crazy picture of me at the first Wizards of the Coast booth. We shared the booth with a small little internet start-up, America Online. Back then, it was all Talislanta and The Primal Order, but Magic: The Gathering would become the shot heard around the world in 1993.

Magic almost didn't make it to Gen Con in '93. The shipment got delayed in customs and I literally had to have it put on an airplane so that it arrived Saturday morning at the convention. Word had spread of the game and we literally sold it as fast as we could take money and write receipts. The next year, we had lines that wrapped around the convention hall, with people standing in line for many hours to get limited quantities of Arabian Nights, Legends, Antiquities, and The Dark.

One cool Gen Con moment happened one year when the staff of TSR and the rest of the industry agreed to a huge Nerf gun fight in the TSR Castle before the hall opened up for business. All the other companies ganged up on the TSR folks and a ton of fun was had by all as we all blasted each other with Nerf until we laughed ourselves silly. Imagine over 100 of the industry's finest running around screaming like kids. It was magical.

My next favorite Gen Con memory was when I worked the TSR Castle as a member of the TSR staff in 1997 after Wizards of the Coast bought the company. I was one of a handful of WotC employees who stayed in Lake Geneva that summer and became part of the D&D brand team when the staff transitioned to Seattle later that year. But for the summer of 1997, I worked at TSR and tradition was that the TSR staff all worked hard at Gen Con each year. Wearing my TSR shirt and talking fans off the ledge (everyone was worried about what was going to happen to D&D now that WotC had bought it) in the TSR Castle are moments I will always cherish!

At Gen Con 1999, I was part of the team that announced the impending release of the third edition of D&D the next year. We had this huge auditorium where we trotted out guest after guest from Gygax and Arneson to Cook and Adkison. Seeing the excitement as we let a lot of the cats out of the bag was really cool. And then everyone got one of my favorite t-shirts, the one where it had a list of things people didn't like about previous editions that were getting fixed in third.

	The release of the Pathfinder RPG Core Rulebook at Gen Con 2009.

2002 was my first Gen Con as an owner of Paizo. We had a small table in the WotC booth, where we sold subscriptions to Dragon, Dungeon, and Star Wars Insider. 2003 had us schlepping Silver Boba Fetts. 2004 was the year of the Undefeated cheerleaders. 2005 saw the mountain of Shackled City hardcovers. 2006 saw the release of our GameMastery line of system independent products.

Another great moment was 2007, the year we launched the Pathfinder Adventure Path line. Knowing that Dragon and Dungeon were going away, but that we had this awesome line of adventure product that included some of the best folks in the industry, was satisfying. 2008 saw the release of the Pathfinder RPG Beta. All of us were floored when we sold out of the print version of our Beta playtest. I thought we would be burning the unsold copies. Now it is a collector's item!

Of course, the year 2009 saw the release of the Pathfinder RPG Core Rulebook. The buzz had been amazing building up to this release, but we weren't prepared for the rush of people trying to be the first to buy the book. The Paizo staff ran around like shepherds, trying to tame a semblance of order into 500+ people descending on the booth at the same time. By the time the line went around the booth and into the art show area, I knew something had to happen. So Erik and I grabbed a bag and offered to let people give us $60, get their book, and get out of the line. Many people took us up on that offer.

Now 2011 Gen Con is just a few weeks away. I wonder what stories will be crafted from the Best Four Days in Gaming this year?

Lisa's Gen Con Pictures

Lisa at Gen Con 1992.	Lisa at Gen Con during the WotC years.	Lisa at Paizo's first booth at Gen Con 2002.	Lisa at the Paizo booth at Gen Con 2004.	Paizo staff at Gen Con 2006.

Lisa Stevens
Paizo CEO