Nostalgia for The Brand TSR Turns to Hate
In June there were two companies called TSR, now there are none. With the help of un-savy PR, Ernie Gygax has turned TSR from a nostalgic name for D&D fans, hearkening back to the first company to publish the game, into a toxic dump that nobody wants to be associated with.
After the original publishers of D&D, TSR, sold to Wizards of the Coast (WotC) in 1997, the trademark on the the company name lapsed. Jayson Elliot registered the trademark in 2011 and has operated a game company by the name TSR since 2012. Previously a project shared with Luke and Ernie Gygax, sons of D&D co-creator the late Gary Gygax, the brothers left the company in 2016. This year Ernie Gygax launched his own TSR, with Justin LaNasa and Stephen E. Dinehart, announcing a game called Giantlands and reboot of the game Star Frontiers. Gygax had been able to register the TSR name after Elliot accidentally allowed the trademark to lapse in 2020 and Elliot announced his plan to license the name from Gygax because he could not afford to fight it in court.
So how did gaming go from having two TSR’s this summer to zero now? As with many things these days, the answer involves being racist on social media. Ernie Gygax, after announcing his new company, began the promotion rounds to garner interest. While being interviewed on SciFi4Me’s Live From The Bunker, Gygax made a number of comments that sparked accusations of transphobia and racism.
When asked if he was interested in working with Wizards of the Coast, Gygax said he was but that WotC wouldn’t want to work with him given their “big disclaimer recently trying to divorce themselves from the ethics and style of play that was involved in the origins of the game.” WotC has recent announced they are planning to remove racist and sexist elements from the game, presumably what Gygax is referencing here. Gygax further accused WotC of doing so to “join the pack of lemmings.” Gygax also made a bizarre and racist metaphor, saying WotC were “corporate raiders” now trying to make D&D seem like their own, continuing “American Indians did the same thing they would, um, wipe out another tribe many times take the women and children and murder off everything else and leave to make your tribe that much better.”
Gygax additionally implied his company would be welcoming transphobic game designers and marketing to a transphobic audience. When asked why it was important to make a new TSR, he discussed designers and players saying “recently they were dissed for being old-fashioned, possibly anti modern trends, and enforcing, or even having the concepts of gender identity” after which he laughed. After the confusion of the comment, a trans user of twitter tweeted at Gygax’s TSR company to say equivocally that they weren’t transphobic, the official twitter set up for their project GiantLands responded calling her “disgusting.”
D&D players began passing around Gygax’s comments and encouraging each other not to buy from him, blacklisting the company for its founder’s offensive behavior and its refusal to say that they were not the company’s official stance. Admits the outage, the company doubled down. The Dugeon Hobby Shop Museum, a project associated with Gygax’s TSR, bragged on facebook about offending “the woke” and stated “we have no room at our game table for real world issues.” At the same time Gygax himself tweeted that the outrage was the result of a coordinated attack by WotC.
Elliot’s TSR tried to make very clear they were not the same company as Gygax and announcing they had deciding against licensing the name from them. Luke Gygax, Ernie’s brother, also came out to state that he, his family, and the gaming convention named for his father, Gary Con, had no involvement with his brother’s TSR. Gaming convention Gen Con also announced they had no relation to Gygax’s TSR and stated that because of their comments, Gygax’s TSR would not be welcome at the convention.
After the mess that was June, in July Gary Gygax scrambled to pick up the pieces. He said in a since deleted tweet that he “never meant to hurt anyone of any race, creed, or color” and that “everyone has been welcome at my gaming table.” In a press release, addressing the tweet that called a trans woman “disgusting” Gygax said “The individual who was speaking to you on Twitter does not represent me or TSR in any way. Trans people are always welcome to play with us. Everyone is welcome at our table.” His apology was not enough. Nor was changing who was in charge of the company’s twitter. Soon the name TSR was gone.
Elliot’s TSR changed its name to SOLARIAN in early July, thanking its supporters in a tweet that included the transgender flag. A few days later, Dinehart, who had been part of Gygax TSR’s founding team, announced he was stepping down from the project and taking his game, GiantLands, with him. However soon after, Gygax TSR’s website changed its name to Wonderfilled, a company Dinehart is listed as a collaborator in. Gygax is listed on the website as a collaborator on GiantLand. So it seems that rather than stepping away from TSR, Dinehart was moving with Gygax to rebrand. Today there are no companies calling themselves TSR, the once sought after brand name tarnished by Gygax and his twitter team, or if you believe Gygax, by WotC sponsored character assassination and trolling.