Wizards of the Coast

Wizards of the Coast LLC is an American game publisher, best known as the originator of the collectible card game Magic: The Gathering and as the publisher of the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game, operating as a subsidiary of the toy company Hasbro.⁶¹⁴ The firm holds an exclusive patent on the method of playing trading card games and ranks as a worldwide leader in the trading card game and tabletop role-playing game categories.¹⁴ It is also one of the world’s premier publishers of fantasy fiction, with novels that have reached The New York Times best-seller list and sold millions of copies.¹⁴ Its headquarters are in Renton, Washington, on Lind Avenue south of Seattle.¹²¹

The company was founded in 1990 by Peter Adkison, then a systems analyst at Boeing, together with a group of friends, and initially published role-playing games out of the basement of Adkison’s home.¹³¹⁶ The name “Wizards of the Coast” — a phrase Adkison and his collaborators arrived at during exchanges over the internet in April 1990 — was drawn from an in-game guild.²¹¹⁴ Adkison has recalled the seed of the venture in discussions around 1979 of a Judges Guild product the group felt they lacked the time, experience, or funding to attempt, and in his sense by the spring of 1990 — having paid off his college loans, married, and secured his Boeing career — that gaming was not something he would “grow out of”.²¹

The firm’s first project was The Primal Order, a “capsystem” supplement covering religions and deities meant to be usable across different role-playing systems, released early in 1992 and reported to have sold 2,500 copies within six months.¹⁹ Wizards also licensed the Talislanta game from designer Steve Sechi and had it revised by Jonathan Tweet, the designer of Ars Magica, while announcing a second capsystem book, The Military Order, and a generic statistics system called Envoy.¹⁹ That multisystem approach led to a lawsuit by Palladium Books over use of its game system in The Primal Order, a dispute that nearly put the young company out of business and was settled in March 1993 through arbitration by Mike Pondsmith of R. Talsorian; the settlement effectively ended Wizards’ multisystem experiment.¹⁹

Magic: The Gathering

Adkison asked the mathematician Richard Garfield — then teaching at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, and holding a Ph.D. in combinatorial mathematics — to design a card game that was fun, portable, and playable in under an hour.¹³¹⁴ Garfield had first pitched the board game RoboRally, judged too expensive for the struggling company to produce, before being redirected toward a cheaper, more portable idea combining the appeal of baseball cards with a card game.¹⁹¹⁴ The result, Magic: The Gathering, was released in August 1993 by a staff of eight working from Adkison’s basement.¹³ Set in the imaginary realm of Dominia, the game cast players as wizards using cards representing creatures and spells to reduce an opponent’s score from 20 to 0.¹³

Magic was the first product of its kind and an immediate commercial success, outselling Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit and spawning an entire sub-industry of trading card games.¹³ More than ten million cards sold within six weeks across over 10,000 book, music, and comic stores — among them Barnes & Noble, Tower Records, and Borders — and the game lofted the company from a handful of employees in 1993 to 250 by 1995.¹³¹² It went on to be published in nine languages and in more than 65 countries, and the company launched a bimonthly magazine, the Duelist, offering rules, strategy, and tournament news.¹³ Among his influences Garfield cited Lewis Carroll and J. R. R. Tolkien, the author of The Lord of the Rings.¹³ The success allowed the company to relocate to Renton and open international offices in Milan, Paris, and Antwerp.¹³ Garfield joined full-time in June 1994 and Wizards released his RoboRally as its first major board game that October.¹³

Wizards extended the format with further card games, including a 1995 medieval-themed game, The Great Dalmuti — its first product distributed through retail channels — and a BattleTech trading card game released in November 1996 that became the second best-selling trading card game in the United States.¹³ In 1996 the telecommunications company MCI entered a three-year sponsorship of the Magic: The Gathering U.S. Tournament, estimated at $750,000, and issued prepaid phone cards bearing Magic artwork.¹³ The same period saw the company buy the Ohio trade-show operator Andon Unlimited and, amid growing pains, retire its Everway, Ars Magica, and Slay Industries lines.¹³

Acquisition of TSR and Dungeons & Dragons

In April 1997 Wizards of the Coast announced its intent to acquire the struggling TSR Inc., founded in 1973 and best known as the publisher of Gary Gygax’s Dungeons & Dragons, in a deal reported at $25 million.¹³¹⁴ By then TSR had created hundreds of games over its 25 years and seen its products translated into more than a dozen languages and sold in over 50 countries.¹³ The purchase added the role-playing game to the company’s roster, and WotC went on to launch the game’s 3rd Edition in 2000, introduce the Open Game License, and focus on campaign settings such as the Forgotten Realms.¹⁴¹² In 1999 the company also began publishing the English-language Pokémon Trading Card Game, which sold nearly 400,000 copies in less than six weeks; WotC produced the game until 2003, when Nintendo took over.¹²¹⁴ These acquisitions positioned Wizards as a leader in the gaming field, alongside a licensing program that by 1997 had paired Magic with software developers such as Acclaim Entertainment and MicroProse and book publishers including HarperCollins.¹²¹³

Hasbro ownership

On September 9, 1999, the toy maker Hasbro Inc. announced it was buying the privately held Wizards of the Coast — then described as the maker of the Pokémon trading card and Dungeons & Dragons games, publisher of fantasy and science-fiction books, and operator of 70 retail game stores across the United States — for $325 million in stock.⁶ Hasbro president Alan Hassenfeld said the deal would let the company “significantly expand in the fast-growing games arena,” which he called a cornerstone of its growth strategy.⁶ Wizards of the Coast LLC is incorporated in Delaware and listed among Hasbro’s subsidiaries.⁴⁵ Under Hasbro, Greg Leeds — a Hasbro veteran of six years — became president of Wizards in 2008.¹²

In February 2021 Hasbro reorganized into three divisions, making Wizards of the Coast the core of a new “Wizards & Digital” unit tasked with expanding Dungeons & Dragons, Magic: The Gathering, and other games, creating new ones, and overseeing digital licensing for the whole company.⁷⁸ The other two units covered consumer products — toys and classic board games such as Monopoly — and entertainment, encompassing film and television.⁷ The reorganization followed strong results: Wizards of the Coast posted revenue of $816 million in 2020, up 24% from 2019, amid a pandemic-fueled boom in tabletop gaming, even as Hasbro’s overall net revenue fell 8% to $5.47 billion.⁷ According to chief executive Brian Goldner, the Wizards unit was on track to double its revenue between 2018 and 2023.⁷ Among the products announced around the reorganization were Magic crossovers with the Lord of the Rings and Warhammer 40,000 properties, the Lord of the Rings set later releasing in June 2023 as The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth.⁸²⁰

The company has since expanded into video games and licensed entertainment, signing publishing agreements with studios including Giant Skull for an original Dungeons & Dragons action-adventure game and developing the science-fiction action role-playing game Exodus through Archetype Entertainment, with a launch planned for early 2027.²⁰¹⁵ It has also pursued screen adaptations, announcing the official Dungeons & Dragons actual-play series Dungeon Masters in April 2026.²⁰ Wizards of the Coast’s specialties include the historical wargame imprint Avalon Hill, and the company operates the Wizards Play Network of more than 12,000 retail stores.¹⁵ As of recent reporting it employs between 501 and 1,000 people and maintains offices in Renton and Bellevue, Washington, and Uxbridge, England.¹⁵