The Voyage of Magellan, Chapter 24: A Pirate’s Life
Monthly Archives: February 2025
The CRPG Renaissance, Part 3: TSR is Dead…
“How do you make a small fortune in tabletop gaming?” runs an old joke.
The punchline, of course, is that you come to that market with a large one.
The tabletop truly is a brutally challenging place to try to earn money, one which you have to be either wildly deluded or unbelievably passionate to even contemplate entering. Nevertheless, people have been making a go of it there for quite some decades by now. We’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that love rather than mental illness is the motivating force. For, whatever else you can say about these folks, nobody is more passionate about their hobby than old-school tabletoppers.
If you do dare to dream of making real money on the tabletop, there are two ways you might envision doing so. One is to strike gold with a once-in-a-blue-moon mass-market perennial of the sort that eventually winds up in every other family’s closet: a Monopoly, a Scrabble, a Clue, a Trivial Pursuit. Under this model, you sell that one game to tens if not hundreds of millions of people, the majority of whom might not buy another board game for five or ten years after buying yours.
The other pathway to profit — or at least to long-term survival — is to score a hit in the hobbyist market. Here your sales ceiling is much lower. But, because you’re selling to people who see tabletop gaming as a lifestyle rather than a gambit to divert the kids on a rainy afternoon, you can potentially keep selling them additions to the same basic game for years and years, turning it into not so much a single product as a whole ecosystem of same. It’s a tougher row to hoe in that it requires an ongoing effort on your part to come up with a steady stream of new content that appeals to your customers, but it’s marginally more achievable than winning the lottery that is the mass market.
That said, any given game need not be exclusively of the one sort or the other. Crossover hits are possible and even increasingly common. In recent decades, several hobbyist games — among them titles such as Catan, Carcassonne, and Ticket to Ride — have proved to possess the necessary blend of relatability, simplicity, and fun to be sold in supermarkets and greeting-card shops in addition to the scruffy hobbyist boutiques.
Way back in the early 1980s, Dungeons & Dragons was successful enough that its maker, the Lake Geneva, Wisconsin-based TSR, dared to wonder whether that game might be able to make the leap to the mainstream, however strange it may have seemed to imagine that an exercise in elaborate make-believe and tactical monster-fighting might have the same sort of legs as Monopoly. After all, despite its complexity and subject matter, Dungeons & Dragons was already far more culturally visible than Monopoly, a fixture of school cafeterias and anti-Satanic evangelical sermons alike.
Alas, it was not to be. The Dungeons & Dragons wave crested in 1982, after which the bandwagon jumpers began to jump off the wagon again. True mass-market success was probably never in the cards for a company whose acronym stood for “Tactical Studies Rules.” Luckily for TSR, they retained a core group of loyalists who were willing to splash out considerable sums of money on their hobby. Indeed, for a goodly while it seemed like they would snatch up as much new Dungeons & Dragons product as TSR cared to throw at them.
A new era of Dungeons & Dragons merchandising dawned in 1984, when TSR rolled out a trans-media property known as Dragonlance: twelve individual adventure modules, plus two source books and even a strategic board game, all meant to allow a group of players to interactively experience an epic tale of fantasy war that could also be read about in a trilogy of thick conventional novels, the first of their kind that TSR had ever published. It was a brilliant conception in its way, and it became hugely popular with the fan base, heralding a slow shift in TSR’s rhetoric around Dungeons & Dragons. In the past, it had been promoted as a game of free-flowing imagination, primarily a system for making up your own worlds and stories. In the future, the core rules would be marketed as a foundation that you built upon not so much with your own creativity as with other, more targeted TSR products: settings to inhabit, adventures to go through in those settings, new rule books to make a complicated game still more complicated.
The transaction was not so cynical as I might have made it sound. The products themselves were often excellent, thanks to TSR’s dedicated and imaginative staff, and many or most fans felt they got fair value for their ongoing investment. Yet the fact remained that this was also TSR’s only viable way of remaining solvent after the mainstream culture had dismissed Dungeons & Dragons as a weird, kitschy fad or a shorthand for abject nerdiness.
As it was, though, TSR coasted along fairly comfortably on these terms for quite some years. The Dungeons & Dragons supplements continued to sell, even after there were so many of them that it was difficult to see how even the most committed zealot could possibly find the time to get more than a tiny percentage of them to the table. (TSR doubtless benefited from the fact that a lot of fans could get pleasure out of the source books without ever using them for their intended purpose: a surprising number of people over the years have told me that they liked to read such books just to appreciate the meticulous world-building.) The release of a modestly revised “Second Edition” of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons in 1989 sent the fans scrambling to re-buy a game they already owned, if for no other reason than to stay compatible with that fire hose of adventures and supplements. Meanwhile TSR found an unexpectedly rich new revenue stream in the many Dungeons & Dragons novels that followed in the wake of that first Dragonlance trilogy; the sales of virtually any of these dwarfed the unit sales of the typical gaming product, while the most popular of all among them, such as R.A. Salvatore’s tales of the dark-elf ranger Drizzt, climbed high on the New York Times bestseller charts. Add to this a deal with SSI to make Dungeons & Dragons-branded computer games, five of which sold more than 100,000 copies from 1988 to 1991. Between the novels and the computer games, Dungeons & Dragons had become as much an abstract lifestyle brand as a concrete tabletop game by the beginning of the 1990s.
It was at about this time that it all started to go wrong — subtly wrong at first, then obviously, and then disastrously. The root of the rot is hard to pinpoint precisely, as these things always are.
Some people point as far back as 1985, when Lorraine Williams, a wealthy heiress who owed her fortune primarily to the Buck Rogers character of comic-book, movie-serial, and television fame, ousted Gary Gygax and took over the company in a palace coup. She is not, to say the least, a highly regarded figure among old-school Dungeons & Dragons fandom. For our part, we need to tread cautiously here; there’s an ugly undertone of gatekeeping and/or misogyny that clings to many fan narratives about Williams’s tenure at the head of TSR. Nonetheless, it is true that she had little intrinsic interest in Dungeons & Dragons; in fact, she sometimes seemed to regard the game’s fans with something perilously close to contempt. In the beginning, TSR was in a strong enough position to overcome her estrangement from the market she served. Later on, this would no longer be the case.
Other people prefer to point to 1991, when a new publisher called White Wolf released a tabletop RPG called Vampire: The Masquerade, which portrayed its titular monsters not as blood-sucking horrors but as sexy lovers of the night straight out of an Anne Rice novel. That, combined with its rules-light approach, attracted a whole new demographic who wouldn’t have been caught dead battling hobgoblins in a fantasy dungeon: too-cool-for-school Goths, who gave free rein to their inner fiends around the gaming table in between Cure concerts. Even in its allegedly streamlined second edition, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons looked stodgy and pedantic to the eyes of many gamers when compared with its younger, slicker competition. For arguably the only time in the entire history of the tabletop RPG, there was real reason to question whether Dungeons & Dragons would continue to be the unrivaled giant of the field going forward. Sales of TSR’s rules and supplements fell off gradually, while sales on the digital front fairly fell off a cliff: no other Dungeons & Dragons computer game from SSI would come anywhere close to sales of 100,000 units after Eye of the Beholder in 1991.
Then, just when it looked like Dungeons & Dragons was at risk of losing its position at the top of the tabletop-RPG pile, another sort of game entirely came along to kick the whole stack right out from under all of them. In August of 1993, a little card game called Magic: The Gathering, designed by a graduate student in combinatorics named Richard Garfield and bearing the logo of a heretofore unsuccessful publisher of tabletop-RPG material named Wizards of the Coast, was debuted at the Gen Con trade show in Wisconsin — a show which had been started by Gary Gygax all the way back in 1968, and which was still put on every year by TSR. At this 26th installment of Gen Con, however, the talk was all about Magic rather than Dungeons & Dragons. Allen Varney later wrote in TSR’s own house magazine Dragon how
people clustered three deep around the Wizards of the Coast table, craning to see the ongoing demonstrations of this game. Everywhere I went I saw someone playing it. In discussing it, some players showed reserved admiration, others enthusiasm, but body language told more than words. Everyone hunched forward intently, the way you do in deep discussions of politics or religion. Onlookers and devoted fans alike felt compelled to grapple with the idea of this game. It achieved more than just a commercial hit; it redefined gamers’ perspectives on their hobby.
The scenes that Varney witnessed were a microcosm of what was about to happen to hobbyist gaming in general, as tabletop fantasy, for so many years a relatively stable market, was hit by this new, profoundly destabilizing force.
We can point to any number of grounds for Magic’s enormous appeal. Many of them boil down to convenience: it was quick to set up and could be played in twenty minutes or so by just two people, without either of them having to read much in the way of rules beyond what was printed on the cards themselves. (Compare this with needing to assemble at least four or five friends to play Dungeons & Dragons, as well as with that game’s hundreds of pages of rules, the crushing weight of preparation and responsibility it put on the Dungeon Master who guided the session, and its equally extreme demands of time; many a Dungeons & Dragons party hadn’t yet decided what equipment to carry into the dungeon by the time twenty minutes had elapsed.) Then, too, the Magic cards were beautifully illustrated, such that collecting them could become an end unto itself. Finally, add to all of this a feeling that had been setting in even before that pivotal Gen Con: that Dungeons & Dragons had become old hat, an artifact of the last two decades rather than this one. A new generation of gamers craved something fresh. For better or for worse, it seemed that Magic was that thing.
Magic became an unprecedented phenomenon in tabletop gaming, its astounding growth curve eclipsing by a veritable order of magnitude even the early days of Dungeons & Dragons. More than TSR ever had, Wizards of the Coast had well and truly mastered the art of making money in hobbyist gaming by selling the same group of people an infinite stream of content for the same basic game. They had mastered it so well, in fact, that there wasn’t much room left for TSR; a gamer who spent all of his allowance or paycheck on new Magic decks simply didn’t have any money left to give to Dungeons & Dragons.
Like many other shell-shocked publishers in the tabletop-RPG space, TSR tried to fight back by quite literally playing Wizards of the Coast’s own game. Already in 1994, they released a collectible card game of their own called Spellfire. It’s doubtful whether it would have been able to overcome Magic’s first-mover advantage even if its use of recycled, clashing artwork from previous eras of Dungeons & Dragons hadn’t made it look so much like the rushed knockoff product it was. TSR mustered a modicum more creativity for 1995’s Dragon Dice, which replaced collectible cards with — you guessed it — collectible dice. But it too failed to attract the critical mass of players it needed in order to become self-sustaining. Collectible anything games writ large were a zero-sum game, one in which all of the cards seemed to belong to Wizards and Magic.
Any reasonably thoughtful observer who looked at TSR from the outside at mid-decade would have seen a deeply troubled company, whose flagship game was shrinking away before its eyes. Only one fact might have tended to disabuse our observer of that notion: the fact that TSR kept pumping out product for that same incredible shrinking game at a more furious pace than ever. And make no mistake: TSR’s tabletop Dungeons & Dragons products weren’t slapdash in the way of Spellfire. They were crafted with self-evident love and care, were beautifully illustrated and packaged. The mystery was how the company could afford to put out so darn much quality content in the face of so many financial headwinds. By 1995, TSR had no fewer than twelve separate Advanced Dungeons & Dragons campaign settings on the market, each of them taking the form of a mouth-wateringly lavish and rather pricey boxed set. J.R.R. Tolkien and Jack Vance were no longer the alpha and omega of Dungeons & Dragons. You could now play in a post-apocalyptic milieu, in a surrealistic alternate dimension worthy of a Salvador Dali painting, or in outer space. If you liked vampires and gothic horror, you could even play with them without having to jump ship to White Wolf, by picking up a copy of Ravenloft. Committing one’s regular gaming group to any one of these settings meant forgoing all of the others for months or years to come. Even if our observer recognized that a high percentage of customers bought the boxed sets just to browse them and dream about what they might do with them someday, the deluge of content still seemed out of all proportion to the shrinking market for Dungeons & Dragons in general.
Really: just who was buying up enough of this content so that TSR had the money to keep putting out still more of it? The answer to that question would have stunned our hypothetical mid-1990s observer.
In the book Slaying the Dragon, his 2022 “Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons,” Ben Riggs pulls back the curtain on the perverse incentives that were dictating much of TSR’s publication schedule by this point. Since the first incipient rumblings of a full-blown Dungeons & Dragons fad back in 1979, TSR had used the print-publishing mega-corporation Random House as their vehicle for getting product into bookstores. That is to say that TSR continued to act as their own publisher, but they used Random House as their distributor. In a normal arrangement of this sort, the publisher sends their products after they’ve been printed to their distributor, who stashes them in a warehouse and proceeds to take orders from retail stores. As orders come in, the distributor ships out the products, and sends back to the publisher the price of each order, minus the distributor’s own cut for services rendered. Many contracts do allow retailers to send back products that have sat on the shelf for a given span of time without selling, but we need not get into those complications here, because the contract that TSR had with Random House was a highly unusual one in another respect.
Instead of paying TSR as retail stores ordered their products, Random House paid for each shipment up-front, as soon as it arrived at their warehouse, and then tried to recoup that money by selling it on to retail. If we squint just right, we can see why Random House might have agreed to such a seemingly disadvantageous arrangement back in 1979. At that time, TSR might have looked to be a rising star, but they were still rather cash- and investment-poor. On the theory that it’s best to strike while the iron is hot, it might have made sense to someone at Random House to give TSR a way to produce more products more quickly, without having to wait for the revenues from the earlier ones to filter back into their coffers. But the inadvertent byproduct was to break the most fundamental laws of capitalism. “The printing of products was essentially the printing of money,” writes Ben Riggs. “The company had broken free of supply and demand. Perhaps this is why the company kept making settings, even though almost every new iteration sold less than the last one.” The logic was as simple as it was degenerate: if you weren’t making enough money on Dungeons & Dragons, the best remedy was to make more Dungeons & Dragons and send it to Random House. Let them worry about finding a way to unload the stuff.
There was just one problem with that formulation: the payment which Random House sent back to TSR upon receiving each truck-load of product was actually considered to be a loan, unless and until Random House recouped their costs through sales to retailers. The checks from Random House turned into an unpaid bar tab that just kept building and building while Dungeons & Dragons’s retail sales went south. Whether out of benevolence or just because they weren’t really paying attention, Random House was remarkably patient about demanding that TSR settle their tab. But by mid-1995 TSR owed Random House $12 million, with no realistic prospect at current sales volumes of paying off the debt. How long could the mega-corporation’s largess persist?
On every front, TSR was now scrabbling for traction. The digital realm was looking as ugly as that of the tabletop, as SSI’s latest computer games struggled to compete amidst a new fixation on fast-paced real-time as opposed to turn-based forms of gameplay and a more generalized CRPG downturn in the marketplace. After 1993’s Dark Sun: Shattered Lands, which was supposed to be something of a reboot for the Dungeons & Dragons brand on computers, sold fewer than 50,000 copies, TSR began looking for alternatives to SSI. In truth, while SSI had certainly done the license few favors of late — they had released too many games too quickly, with too many of them of workmanlike quality at best — the brand’s woes on the computer went well beyond one injudicious publisher. The malaise of the tabletop was no less prevalent on the digital side of the divide. Dungeons & Dragons just didn’t seem cool anymore — not even nerdy cool.
Nevertheless, TSR terminated their exclusive contract with SSI as soon as it was possible to do so. It came to an end on January 1, 1995, although SSI was given a grace period of six months to put out the last games they had in the pipeline on a non-exclusive basis. Instead of signing another all-encompassing deal like the one they had had with SSI, TSR opted for a bespoke approach, allowing individual publishers to come to them with proposals for individual games. In 1996, Acclaim Entertainment released a rather lame Dungeons & Dragons-branded action game called Iron & Blood: Warriors of Ravenloft (“NO 3-D FIGHTER CAN MATCH THE BRUTAL ACTION OF IRON & BLOOD!”). Blood & Magic, which Interplay published later that year, was a real-time-strategy game that Computer Gaming World magazine felt free to dismiss as “a poor man’s Warcraft — and mind you, I’m comparing it to the original, not the sequel.” In 1997, Sierra delivered a more conceptually interesting but poorly executed CRPG/strategy hybrid called Birthright: The Gorgon’s Alliance. These publishers were most definitely not trying to recreate the Dungeons & Dragons tabletop experience on computers, as SSI had so earnestly strained to do in the days of Pool of Radiance. They viewed the Dungeons & Dragons name, which was selling at a steep discount by now, merely as a way to squeeze a few extra unit sales out of the mediocre games to which they applied it.
By the time the aforementioned computer games appeared, TSR was well into its death spiral. At this point, even the Dungeons & Dragons novels, for years the company’s most stable income stream, weren’t selling like they used to. The market had become over-saturated with these things too — TSR published fourteen of them in 1994 alone — even as the brand’s innate cachet had declined and the most popular authors of the past, most notably R.A. Salvatore, had been lost to other book publishers who tended to pay far better.
Unsurprisingly, the beginning of the end came when Random House got serious at last about trying to get their money back. In the summer of 1995, they forced TSR to agree to a debt-repayment plan. TSR was to reduce their outstanding obligation from $12 million to $8.2 million by the end of the year, then pare it down to less than $1 million by the end of 1996. If TSR failed to do so, Random House said, they would initiate legal proceedings to recover the money they were owed.
To their credit, TSR did make an effort to meet Random House’s terms. They were able to reduce the debt to $9.5 million by early in 1996, largely on the strength of the novel Dragons of Summer Flame, a much-hyped continuation of the original Dragonlance saga by Margaret Weis and Tracey Hickman, the primary architects of the mid-1980s trans-media project that still stood as such a landmark in the history of Dungeons & Dragons. But a demonstration of good-faith effort was no longer good enough in the opinion of Random House; their forbearance had run out. In April of 1996, they sued TSR for the remaining millions, just as they had said they would. At the same time, they stopped accepting more product from TSR for distribution — a sensible policy under the circumstances, given that every book, supplement, or game that arrived at their warehouse only added to the debt they were trying to collect. Yet this move deprived TSR of the better half of their distribution network, making the prospect of another fluke hit like Dragons of Summer Flame that much more unlikely.
It was right about this time that TSR stopped paying the majority of their bills. Authors stopped receiving their royalty checks, and TSR’s printer too went uncompensated. Desperate to head off a lawsuit from the latter on top of the one they were facing from Random House, TSR resorted to giving them their offices, then leasing the premises back. In another delaying tactic, TSR pledged the Dungeons & Dragons trademark itself, the crown jewel of their intellectual property, as collateral on their debt to Random House. Needless to say, such last-ditch machinations could only put off the inevitable final reckoning.
The layoffs began in December of 1996. There was a poignancy to these that vastly exceeded the loss of any ordinary job. The people who worked at TSR, more often than not for shockingly low salaries, did it purely out of passion. All of the content they churned out may have made no economic sense, but one only has to glance through the books to see the amount of love and care that was put into them. There was literally no other job in the world like a job at TSR. I can’t help but be reminded of the 1989 shuttering of Infocom, another sui generis creative collective. Ben Riggs:
What do you do, what do you say, when someone is fired from TSR? What would their next job be? Teacher? Journalist? Marketing? Whatever it was, you wouldn’t be working on Dungeons & Dragons. You wouldn’t be paid to think about bugbears, beholders, or bladesingers. For some, leaving the company wasn’t just losing a job, it was leaving a life…
The annual Christmas party turned into a wake for the departed, who were toasted by surviving comrades who knew that their own turn must be coming soon. For it was hard for anyone at TSR to see how the company could possibly recover. Sure enough, within days of the Christmas party, TSR’s printer/landlord stopped printing anything at all for them and initiated eviction proceedings to claim their office space for paying tenants.
Few at TSR realized that a way out had been available to Lorraine Williams for a couple of years by this point. Peter Adkison, the founder and head of Wizards of the Coast, was in a rare position for a chief executive in the tabletop industry: that of running a company that was flush with cash. Despite having done so much to engineer TSR’s doom through Magic, he was very fond of Dungeons & Dragons, and believed that the game and the brand could be resuscitated and made (nerdy) cool again if it was just managed and marketed properly. And unlike TSR, he was in a position to pour serious resources into that task, thanks to his Magic money-printing machine. He let it be known that he would be very interested in doing a deal.
And yet his feelers were steadfastly ignored for two years. Lorraine Williams had an intensely personal loathing for Adkison and his company. Even as Magic had been devouring Dungeons & Dragons at the cash registers of hobby shops, Wizards had repeatedly upstaged TSR in other ways, making tabletop gaming’s lion in winter look stodgy and out of touch over and over again.
Take, for example, the respective reactions to the nascent World Wide Web. TSR saw the fans who flocked online to discuss their hobby and share their ideas, experiences, and creations mostly as a threat to their intellectual property. A set of “guidelines” issued by TSR in 1994 is breathtaking in its wrong-headedness; it essentially makes a “no Dungeons & Dragons allowed” zone out of the entire Internet, with the threat of legal action lurking not so subtly behind its words.
If the party encounters a hydra, let the game master look up the stats for the hydra in the game system he is using. Don’t set the adventures in a TSR world. Create your own or use one from history or legend. Don’t use monsters, spells, etc. that were created by TSR. Create and name your own. Draw on history, legend or reality. Even spell their actual names backward for uniqueness.
Threatening one’s most devoted customers is not a good way to inculcate trust and loyalty in them; nor is forcibly silencing them a good way to spread the word about one’s products. The fans decided that the TSR acronym must really stand for “They Sue Regularly.”
Peter Adkison, on the other hand, recognized the enormous potential of the new digital medium of instant worldwide communication whose rise coincided almost exactly with that of Magic. He made sure Wizard’s site was one of the most advanced on the young Web, granted lengthy interviews to the most prominent of the third-party sites that were soon springing up by the dozen each month, and made no move to interfere when fans began using the Internet to buy and sell Magic cards, at a time when e-commerce in general was still little more than a gleam in a few venture capitalists’ eyes. Such a grass-efforts grapevine was, he knew, better publicity than he could buy with millions of dollars of worth of traditional advertising. It’s no wonder that Lorraine Williams grew to hate him so. To her, he must have seemed bent on demonstrating to the world every single day how much cleverer and more clued-in he was. Even with her own company sinking beneath her feet, Williams refused to countenance climbing onboard her one available lifeboat.
The impasse was finally broken by a wily third party named Bob Abramowitz. Abramowitz was the CEO of yet another game publisher, an outfit called Five Rings Publishing whose flagship product was a collectable card game called Legend of the Five Rings. He met Lorraine Williams at the American International Toy Fair in February of 1997. (Incredibly, she was still attending such events at this late juncture, even though her company was now utterly paralyzed, thanks to their angry printer who refused to accept new jobs.) Being well acquainted with the rumors that were swirling around the industry about TSR’s dire straits, Abramowitz broached a visit to their Lake Geneva headquarters to kick the tires and discuss a possible purchase, even though he knew full well that he was possessed of nothing like the financing that would be necessary to pull off such a deal.
Luckily for him, Williams invited him to come on out without bothering to check his bona fides. Over the course of several days in Lake Geneva, he and a couple of associates pored over TSR’s books, learning to their shock that things there were actually much, much worse than they had ever dreamed they might be. Abramowitz would later describe how “in the halls that had produced the stuff of my childhood fantasies, and had fired my imagination and become unalterably intertwined with my own sense of self, I found echoes, empty desks, and the terrible depression of lost purpose.” At the end of the visit, Abramowitz and Williams signed a formal letter of intent, in which the latter stated that she was prepared to sell TSR to the former for $25 million. Because any such sale would come complete with $30 million in unpaid debts, the effective price tag would amount to about $55 million.
In reality, Abramowitz hadn’t a prayer of raising even $25 million. What he did have, however, was a plan. He finagled a meeting with Peter Adkison and showed him the letter of intent. It proved that Williams was willing and even eager to sell her company in principle. The sticking point was whether she could be convinced to sell it to Peter Adkison and Wizards of the Coast. Having gotten this far with her, Abramowitz thought he could talk her around to that distasteful prospect. He was prepared to try his hardest to do so — as long as Adkison agreed to also buy Five Rings, whose own collectible card game was struggling mightily to compete with Magic.
“But why not just let TSR go bankrupt, and then buy it without assuming all that debt?” Adkison asked.
“Because,” Abramowitz explained, “the trademarks are already mortgaged. What’s valuable here isn’t TSR itself. It’s Dungeons & Dragons. The only way you can be sure of getting it is to buy the whole company now, while it’s still intact.”
Adkison tried a bit more to play devil’s advocate, but his heart wasn’t really in it. Abramowitz had already seen his interlocutor’s eyes light up when he had first mentioned a deal involving TSR and Dungeons & Dragons. He had known then and there that he had hooked his whale.
His plan worked like a charm. He flew back to Lake Geneva, and, in the course of a tense 90-minute conversation, convinced Lorraine Williams to sell her company to the last person in the world she wanted to. Then he sold Five Rings as well to Wizards, walking away from the spate of deal-making rid of that money-losing albatross and with a substantial sum of cash for the pockets of him and his partners. Bravo for him.
The impending purchase was announced on April 10, 1997; the sale was finalized on June 2. By this point, Wizards was a far bigger, wealthier company than TSR had ever been. They were able to buy TSR and bulldoze away the mountain of debt without taking any new bank financing of their own — so much money were they bringing in through Magic.
Peter Adkison held an all-hands meeting with the understandably nervous remaining staff of TSR on June 3. At it, he told them that he had bought the company for two things: for Dungeons & Dragons, yes, but also for the very people who were gathered in that room, the ones who made the game. TSR’s Lake Geneva offices would be closed, marking the end of Wisconsin’s unlikely tenure as the center of the tabletop-RPG universe, but most employees would receive an offer to move to Seattle and work in Wizard’s headquarters. With Magic doing such gangbusters business, Wizards of the Coast had the time and money to rebuild the Dungeons & Dragons brand carefully and methodically, even if it took years. They would soon begin work on a third edition of the rules, the most sweeping revision ever, intended to make the game understandable and appealing to a whole new generation of players without losing the core of what had made it such a sensation in the first place. The future of Dungeons & Dragons was bright, Adkison insisted.
What Adkison couldn’t have envisioned on that day was that the resuscitation of Dungeons & Dragons would begin in the digital rather than the tabletop realm, courtesy of one of the most iconic CRPGs of all time — a Pool of Radiance for this new decade.
Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.
Sources: The books Beneath a Starless Sky: Pillars of Eternity and the Infinity Engine Era of RPGs by David L. Craddock; Designers & Dragons: A History of the Roleplaying Game Industry, Volumes 1 and 3, by Shannon Appelcline; Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons by Ben Riggs; and Generation Decks: The Unofficial History of Magic: The Gathering by Titus Chalk; Game Wizards: The Epic Battle for Dungeons & Dragons by Jon Peterson. Dragon of January 1994; Computer Gaming World of April 1997.
Online sources include DM David’s blog, especially “TSR Declares War on the Internet’s D&D Fans” and “The Threat That Nearly Killed Dungeons & Dragons — Twice.”
I also made use of the SSI archive donated by Joel Billings to the Strong Museum of Play.
The CRPG Renaissance, Part 2: Might and Magic VI
From the 1980s until well into the 1990s, the CRPG genre was typically dumped into the same broad bucket as the adventure game by the gaming press. Indeed, as late as the turn of the millennium, Computer Gaming World magazine had an “Adventure/RPG” department, complete with regular columnists whose beat encompassed both genres. Looking back, this lack of distinction might strike us as odd: CRPGs, which are to a greater or lesser extent simulations of an imaginary world with a considerable degree of emergent behavior, are far more procedurally intensive than traditional adventure games and provide a very different experience.
Back in the day, however, no one blinked an eye. For the one thing the genres did plainly have in common was sufficient to set them apart from all other sorts of games: their engagement with narrative. Whatever else they might happen to be, both an adventure game and a CRPG were a story that you engaged with much as you might a book — that is to say, you played through it once to completion, then set it aside. Contrast this with other kinds of games, which provided shorter-form experiences that you could repeat again and again.
As you are well aware if you’ve been reading my more recent articles, the adventure game suffered its own commercial slump in the 1990s. Said slump began a couple of years after the CRPG slid into the doldrums, but it proved vastly more sustained — so sustained, in fact, that the genre has been more or less consigned to niche status ever since. It’s frequently been argued that the adventure game didn’t so much die on the vine as get eaten alive by other gaming genres. Already at the very dawn of the 1990s, games like Wing Commander started to appropriate the adventure’s interest in telling a relatively complex story and to insert it into new gameplay contexts. That left set-piece puzzle-solving as the adventure’s only remaining unique attribute, and it soon turned out that most people had never been all that keen on that gameplay paradigm in the first place. Of course, this is a hopeless oversimplification of the adventure genre’s fall from grace — bad design and a more generalized drift toward more action-oriented forms of gameplay surely played major roles as well — but that doesn’t mean there isn’t something to the argument.
I bring all of this up here because I think that we can see a variation of the Wing Commander syndrome afflicting the CRPG as well during its own years in the wilderness. That is to say that, even as the profile of games that explicitly called themselves CRPGs was waning during the mid-1990s, games of other types were starting to betray the genre’s unmistakable influence, via the rise of what we’ve come to call “RPG elements.” We see these especially in the strategy games of the era.
In MicroProse’s 1994 classic XCOM,[1]The game was known as UFO: Enemy Unknown in its British homeland and elsewhere in Europe. you guide squads of soldiers who each have their own distinctive strengths, weaknesses, and personality traits, who can “level up” and improve their skills and equipment as they fight battles against alien invaders. Many players have described the tight bond they form with their soldiers as being at the heart of their love for the game as a whole, described feeling real bereavement and even guilt when one of their stalwart veterans gets killed in action after following their orders.
The same year as XCOM, SSI celebrated their impending loss of the Dungeons & Dragons license by releasing Panzer General, a “beer and pretzels” wargame which casts you in the role of a Wehrmacht general during the Second World War, passing through campaigns and battles drawn from real and alternate history, bringing your most loyal units along with you and watching proudly as they too grow in effectiveness — and perhaps crying when your well-intentioned orders get them blown to Kingdom Come.
These trends have persisted down to today, when RPG elements are found in such far-flung genres as sports games that let you guide an athlete through a “career mode” and language-learning apps that deal in experience points and “daily quests.” The point of contrast between the adventure and CRPG genres in all of this lies in the fact that the latter has fully returned from its brush with death and retaken its old place as a recognized part of the mainstream gaming landscape. In the heyday of XCOM and Panzer General, however, it was by no means obvious that the CRPG was not destined to be looted for whatever ideas other genres found of use and then left high and dry, just as the adventure would shortly be.
If we’re looking for a poster child for the trend, it would be hard to find a better one than New World Computing, a studio and publisher that was located not that far from Interplay in Southern California. New World’s equivalent of Brian Fargo was one Jon Van Caneghem, who built his company on the back of a CRPG franchise known as Might and Magic, producing five installments of same between 1986 and 1993. Might and Magic’s commercial fortunes paralleled those of the genre writ large. Plotted on a grid, they would yield an almost perfectly symmetrical bell curve, rising to a peak with Might and Magic III in 1991 and then declining markedly again with the next two games.
By 1994, then, Van Caneghem had to face up to the reality that it might be time to take a break from the genre that had gotten New World this far. So, instead of jumping right into a Might and Magic VI, he came up with a simple fantasy strategy game that used CRPG-style character-building as its special sauce. Hoping to capitalize on the residual goodwill toward New World’s flagship series, he called it Heroes of Might and Magic, even though it had nothing to do with those games in terms of either its gameplay or its fiction, beyond their mutual use of the broadest archetypes of epic fantasy. In all honesty, the choice of a name for the new game probably didn’t make that much difference one way or the other. What did matter was that Heroes served up tons of accessible fun, being one of those rare gaming specimens that is equally appealing to both the hardcore and the more casual crowd. Upon its release in late 1995, it sold better than any of the CRPGs of which it had been positioned as a spinoff. Understandably enough under the circumstances, Van Caneghem and company left the mother series on the shelf for a while longer, concentrating instead on getting a Heroes of Might and Magic II ready to go in time for the following Christmas. Some might have called this another sign of the CRPG’s declining fortunes; Van Caneghem just called it a smart business decision.
In still another sign of the changing times in gaming, Van Caneghem began looking for a buyer for New World in early 1996, waving the success of Heroes around as his banner while he did so. The decision to surrender his independence wasn’t an easy one, but he felt compelled to make it nevertheless. As the gaming marketplace continued to expand in scope and revenues, it was getting harder and harder for boutique publishers like New World to secure space for themselves on the shelves of big-box retailers. They had managed to score a hit despite the headwinds with Heroes I, but Van Caneghem knew that he would need to harness his games to a bigger engine if he wanted the good times to keep on rolling. On July 10, 1996, New World was acquired by The 3DO Company, just in time for the latter to place the forthcoming Heroes II in more stores than ever that Christmas.
3DO had been spun out of Electronic Arts five years earlier, with EA’s own iconoclastic founder Trip Hawkins at its head. His vision at the time was to build a different kind of games console — different in at least two ways from Nintendo and Sega, who dominated that space during the first half of the 1990s. Rather than being a single chunk of hardware that was manufactured and sold from a single source, the 3DO console was to be a set of specifications that any hardware maker could license. On a similarly empowering note, 3DO would treat those who wished to make software for the platform like partners rather than hostages or supplicants, charging them significantly lower fees than Nintendo or Sega and encouraging more diverse content. Speaking of which: the 3DO was envisioned as much as a multimedia set-top box for the living room as it was a conventional games console. In addition to games, you’d be able to buy interactive encyclopedias, interactive road atlases, interactive documentaries. Even when it came to entertainment, “interactive movies” starring real actors would ideally predominate over the likes of Super Mario. All of this was expected to drive the age of the average 3DO user dramatically upward; it was to be the first console made for and widely adopted by adults.
Alas, none of it panned out as Trip Hawkins had hoped, for a variety of reasons. When the first units finally began to arrive in stores in late 1993, they were expensive in comparison to the competition from Nintendo and Sega. The consoles never gathered the halo of prestige that might have made their higher price survivable; despite Hawkins’s best efforts to talk up the multimedia revolution, most of the adults he had hoped to reach persisted in seeing the 3DO box as just another games console for the kiddies. When judged by this standard, the interactive movies and other highfalutin titles it boasted didn’t make it very appealing.
Thus the 3DO consoles were already under-performing expectations in late 1995, when Sony came along with the PlayStation. Sony did some of what Hawkins had tried to do, fostering a better relationship with developers and offering content that could appeal to a slightly older demographic than that of Nintendo and Sega. Yet they did it in a more judicious way, without completely abandoning the walled-garden approach that had dominated in the console space since the mid-1980s and without venturing too far afield from videogames as they were conventionally understood. Most importantly, they combined their blended approach with better hardware than 3DO had to offer, sold at a far cheaper price. 3DO’s attempt to remake the living-room console as a more open and diverse platform had been a noble experiment in its way, but after the PlayStation hit the scene it became abundantly clear that it had failed.
This failure left The 3DO Company with no obvious reason to exist. Yet the rump of Trip Hawkin’s original grand vision was still fairly flush with venture capital, and nobody there was prepared to just turn out the lights and go home. With his revolutionary agenda having failed him, Hawkins decided to pivot into conventional game publishing — in effect, to return to the business model of Electronic Arts, the very company he had walked away from to found 3DO. But much to his disappointment, he couldn’t make lightning strike twice in this way either; suffice to say that 3DO’s early software portfolio was nothing like the list of early games from EA, which included such future icons of the medium as M.U.L.E., Archon, Murder on the Zinderneuf, and Pinball Construction Set. The one clear exception to a general rule of derivative also-rans from 3DO was Meridian 59, a graphical MMORPG which beat the more celebrated Ultima Online to market by a year, only to be left to slowly die of neglect.
Against such underwhelming competition, the acquisition of New World stands out all the more as the wisest move ever made by 3DO as a publisher. For this deal would yield almost all of the other games to appear with the 3DO logo that have a legitimate claim to being remembered today.
In the beginning, the deal seemed equally beneficial to New World. Jon Van Caneghem was thrilled to be able to turn most of the details of finance and logistics over to 3DO and concentrate on the reason he had founded his company in the first place: to make great games. “I think we started to do our best work after I sold the company to 3DO,” he says, “because I could focus 100 percent on the game development.” The partnership hit the ground running with Heroes of Might and Magic II, which not only refined and expanded upon the gameplay template of its predecessor but added a slew of cutscenes and other audiovisual bells and whistles that were made possible only by the sudden injection of 3DO’s cash. Buoyed by the latter’s extensive distribution network, a happy outcome of ties to Electronic Arts that had still not been completely severed, Heroes II became an even bigger hit than the original.
3DO’s money made it possible for New World to take on multiple high-profile projects at one time. Thus before Heroes II was even released, Van Caneghem had already set some of his staff to work on Might and Magic VI: The Mandate of Heaven, his return to the core series of CRPGs. This might have seemed a risky decision on the face of it, given the current moribund state of the CRPG genre, but the relationship between Van Caneghem and 3DO was strong enough that his new bosses were willing to trust his instincts. Just as 1996 expired, those instincts seemed to be at least partially vindicated, when Blizzard’s Diablo appeared and promptly blew up to massive popularity.
Might and Magic VI has nothing to do with the history of imperial China. The phrase “Mandate of Heaven” is used as its subtitle just because someone at New World thought it sounded cool. Pretty much everything else to be found in the game has the same justification.
Indeed, of all the games and series I’ll be discussing in these articles, the Might and Magic series was in some ways the closest in spirit to Diablo. This isn’t to say that the two were peas in a pod: just to begin the list of differences, those first five Might and Magic games were all turn-based rather than real-time, first-person rather than third-person, with hand-crafted rather than procedurally-generated dungeons and with far more complex and demanding systems to master, whilst quite possibly requiring an order of magnitude more hours for the average player to finish a single time. For all that, though, they did share with Diablo a strident ethic of fun as the final adjudicator. They had no interest in elaborate world-building or statement-making in the way of, say, the Ultima series. At heart, a Might and Magic game was a giant toy box, overflowing with challenges and affordances that could be engaged with in a nearly endless number of ways. Although a Might and Magic CRPG might not represent much of an argument for games as refined storytelling vehicles, much less as art, you were generally too busy messing with all the stuff you found inside it to care.
Do you remember me telling you that Fallout raised the bar of sophistication in CRPG aesthetics? You won’t catch me saying that today. Might and Magic VI’s aesthetic principles are pure, unadulterated teenage Dungeon Master.
Being himself not a particularly artsy guy, Jon Van Caneghem saw no reason to alter this philosophy for Might and Magic VI. Still, he was keenly aware that some things would have to change if the new game was to fit comfortably into a post-DOOM, post-Quake world. Like its predecessors, Might and Magic VI would be a first-person “blobber”: an entire party of characters under your control would be “blobbed” together into a sort of lethal octopus, with you the player staring out from the center of the writhing mass. The big difference with the sixth installment would be that the amalgamation would move about freely — i.e., DOOM (or Ultima Underworld) style — rather than over a step-wise grid of possible locations on the map.
That said, the engine used for Might and Magic VI was not anything to leave shooter fans of its era overly impressed. New World decided not to require or even support the new breed of 3D-graphics cards that were taking gaming by storm just as work on it was beginning. In retrospect, this decision was perhaps a questionable one. For it left Might and Magic VI’s visuals lagging miles behind the state of the art by the time of its eventual release in the spring of 1998; comparisons with Unreal, the latest shooter wunderkind on the block, did not redound to its benefit.
This is not to say that the graphics aren’t endearing. A willingness to be goofy was always intrinsic to the series’s personality. The pixelated environments and the monsters that sometimes look like cut-out dolls that have been pasted on top of a picture of their surroundings are part and parcel of that. If it looked more refined, it wouldn’t look like Might and Magic.
Was anything ever more late 1990s than these digitized character portraits? Xena: Warrior Princess called, asking for Lucy Lawless back.
As I mentioned when discussing Fallout, one of the hidden stumbling blocks for those who dreamed of resuscitating the CRPG was reconciling free-scrolling, real-time movement with the genre’s tradition of relatively complex, usually turn-based combat. I found Fallout’s approach more frustrating than satisfying; I’m therefore happy to say that I like what Might and Magic VI does much better. As with Fallout, there is a turn-based mode here that the game can slip in and out of. But there are two key differences. One is that you choose when to enter and exit the turn-based mode, by hitting — appropriately enough — the enter key. The other is that you can also fight in real-time mode if you like. In a lot of situations, doing so tends to get you killed in a hurry, but there are places, especially once you’ve built up your characters a bit, where you can run and gun almost as if you’re playing a first-person shooter. In turn-based mode, on the other hand, the game plays much like the Might and Magics of yore, except that your party is frozen in place; adjusting your position requires a quick trip in and out of real-time mode. It may sound a little wonky, but it all hangs together surprisingly well in practice. I find Might and Magic VI’s combat to be good fun, which is more than I can say for Fallout.
Sometimes you meet really strange collections of opponents.
And it’s fortunate that I feel that way, because fighting monsters, preparing to fight monsters, and traveling to where monsters are waiting to be fought are what you spend most of your time doing. Might and Magic VI has none of Fallout’s ambitions to reinvent the CRPG as a more holistic sort of interactive narrative. It gives you a collection of blatantly artificial stage sets rather than a lived-in world, filled with non-player characters who function strictly as antagonists to slay, as irrelevant blank slates, or as quest-giving slot machines. Sure, there’s a story — in fact, a story that follows directly on from the main campaign in Heroes of Might and Magic II, representing an effort to integrate the two series in some other sense than their names, their bright and colorful visual aesthetics, and their epic-fantasy trappings. Evil forces are about to destroy the world of Enroth, and Archibald, the villain from Heroes II, is mixed up with them, but not in the way that you might think, and… You know what? I really can’t remember, even though I didn’t finish the game all that long ago. No, wait… I do remember that aliens turn out to be behind it all. This gives you the opportunity to run around shooting robots with lasers before all is said and done. As I mentioned, Might and Magic VI is never afraid to be goofy.
Fighting killer robots, because by now I’ve trashed everything not made of metal.
It’s weirdly freeing to play a game that so plainly answers only to the dictates of fun. Might and Magic VI is a monument to excess sufficient to make a Saudi prince blanch. Whenever I think about it, I remember Gary Gygax’s stern admonition against just this sort of thing in the first-edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide, that staple work of literature of my generation’s nerdy youth.
Many campaigns are little more than a joke, something that better Dungeon Masters jape at and ridicule — rightly so on the surface — because of the foolishness of player characters with astronomically high levels of experience and no real playing skill. These godlike characters boast and strut about with retinues of ultra-powerful servants and scores of mighty magic items, artifacts, [and] relics adorning them as if they were Christmas trees decked out with tinsel and ornaments. Not only are such “Monty Haul” games a crashing bore for most participants, they are a headache for their Dungeon Masters as well…
Might and Magic VI is the perfect riposte for old Gary’s po-faced pronouncements. It lets you advance your characters to level 90 and beyond, by which time they pretty much are gods, able to teleport instantly from one side of a continent to the other and to cover shorter distances by flying high above the mountaintops, raining fiery death from the heavens upon any poor earthbound creatures who happen to be visible below. And you know what? It’s not boring at all. It’s actually kind of awesome. Like Diablo, Might and Magic VI zeroes in relentlessly on the lizard-brain appeal of its genre. We all like to watch the numbers associated with our characters go up and then go up some more, like to know that we’re more formidable today than we were yesterday. (If only real life worked like that…)
Is this really a good idea? Ah, don’t worry about it. This isn’t the sort of game that goes in for moral dilemmas. If it feels good, do it.
The world in which this progress narrative takes place may not be terribly believable even as fantasy goes, but it’s appropriately sprawling. The lovely, throwback cloth map that came in the original box contains no fewer than fifteen discrete regions that you can visit, each of them dauntingly large, full of towns and castles and roaming creatures and hidden and not-so-hidden curiosities, among them the entrances to multiple dungeons that are sometimes shockingly huge in themselves. Although I’m sure some of our modern DLC-fueled monstrosities have far surpassed it in size by now, Might and Magic VI might just be the biggest single CRPG that yours truly has ever played from start to finish.
The game was able to hold my interest for the 100 hours or more I spent with it by giving me so darn much to do. Every town has at least a few quests to see through. Sometimes these are related to the main story line, but more often they’re standalone,. Each of the character classes can evolve into two more advanced incarnations of itself; an archer, for example, can become a “battle mage” and then a “warrior mage.” Doing so entails hunting down the necessary trainer and completing a quest for him or her. Your characters’ more granular skills, which encompass the expected schools of magic and types of weaponry alongside miscellaneous talents ranging from “Bodybuilding” to “Repair Item,” also require trainers in order to be advanced to “Expert” and then “Master” status. There’s always something to do, some goal to pursue, whether it’s provided by the game or one you made up for yourself: collect every single spell; pray at every shrine during the one month of the year when you get something out of it. Because there’s no complex plot whose own needs have to act as a check on your wanderings, it’s always you rather than the game who gets to decide what you do next. This world is truly your oyster — as long as you’re tough enough to take on the many and varied monsters that infest every corner of it that you enter, that is.
Anyone who faces my party has to first make a saving throw against Fashion Atrocities.
The toy-box quality of Might and Magic VI lets it get away with things that less sanguine, more self-serious peers would get dinged for. The jank in the engine — and make no mistake, there’s a lot of jank here — feels more like a feature than a bug when, say, you find just the right angle to stand in a doorway, the one that lets you whale away on a group of monsters while they for some reason can’t hit you. Fairly early in my play-through, I found myself in a sewer filled with living oozes that were impervious to weaponry and shot blobs of slime that were corrosive to armor. The sensible thing to do would have been to go away and come back later. Instead of being sensible, I found a stairway from whose top I could throw my one effective spell at the oozes while they were unable to hit me at all. I spent several evenings luring oozes from all over the sewer back to that killing floor, harvesting huge quantities of experience points from them. Sure, it was kind of tedious, but it was kind of great at the same time. Finding exploits like this — exploits that would undermine a less gonzo, more finely calibrated game — is just another part of the fun of Might and Magic VI. Everyone who’s ever played it seems to come away with her own list of favorite ways to break it.
I’m not even all that bothered that the game feels a little bit unfinished. As you play, you’ll probably find yourself exploring Enroth in an eastward to westward direction, which is all too clearly also the direction in which New World built their world. The last couple of regions you’re likely to visit, along the western edge of the map, are deserts filled with hordes of deadly dragons and not much else. It’s plain as day that New World was running out of gas by the time they got this far. But, in light of all they had already put into their world by this point, it’s hard to begrudge them the threadbare westerly regions too much. I’m well aware that I’m not usually so kind toward such failures to stick the landing; this is the place where I usually start muttering about the need for a work to be complete in an “Aristotelian sense” and all the rest. Never fear; we’ll doubtless return to such pretensions in future articles. But in the case of a joyously goofy, loosey-goosey epic like Might and Magic VI… well, how much more of it do you really want? It’s just not a game to which Aristotelian symmetries apply.
The game is old-school more in spirit than in execution. Among its welcome conveniences is a quest log that’s more reliably to-the-point than the one found in Fallout or even the later Baldur’s Gate. Its interface too is clean and easy to come to grips with, even today. Again, the same can’t be said of Fallout…
Might and Magic VI was released on April 30, 1998. This places it at almost the exact midpoint between Fallout, that first exemplar of a new breed of CRPGs in the offing, and the CRPGS that Interplay would publish near the end of 1998, which would serve to cement and consolidate Fallout’s innovations. For its part, Might and Magic VI can be seen as a bridge between the old ways and the new. In spirit, it’s defiantly old-school. Yet there are enough new features and conveniences — including not just the free-scrolling movement and optional real-time combat, but also such niceties as a quest log, a superb auto-map, and a raft of other information-management functions — to mark it out as a product of 1998 rather than 1988 or even 1993. It sold 125,000 copies in the United States alone, enough to justify Jon Van Caneghem’s risky decision to take a chance on it in the midst of the driest period of the CRPG drought. And its success was well deserved. Few latter-day installments of any series have done as good a job of ratcheting up their accessibility whilst retaining the essence of what made their predecessors popular.
For all their vast differences in form and spirit, aesthetics and gameplay, Diablo, Fallout, and Might and Magic VI together left gamers more excited about the CRPG genre in general than they had been in years. Interplay was now preparing to seize that opportunity. Ten years after the much-celebrated Pool of Radiance, Brian Fargo and company, working in concert with a card-game publisher called Wizards of the Coast, were preparing Dungeons & Dragons for a brand-new star turn. The first mover of the RPG was about to get its mojo back.
I played Might and Magic VI for 100 hours, and all I got was this lousy certificate. Am I proud of my achievement? Maybe just a little…
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Sources: The book Gamers at Work: Stories Behind the Games People Play by Morgan Ramsay and Advanced D&D: Dungeon Master’s Guide by Gary Gygax. Computer Gaming World of October 1997, June 1998, August 1998, and April 2004; Retro Gamer 49; XRDS: The ACM Magazine for Students of Summer 2017.
Online sources include Matt Barton’s interview with Jon Van Caneghem, the RPG Codex interview with Jon Van Caneghem, the Arcade Attack interview with Trip Hawkins, and “Trip’s Big Interactive Reset” by Ernie Smith at Tedium.
Where to Get It: The first six Might and Magic CRPGs are available as a single digital purchase from GOG.com. What a deal!
Footnotes
| ↑1 | The game was known as UFO: Enemy Unknown in its British homeland and elsewhere in Europe. |
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