Yesterday, Lisa announced her total retirement from game publishing after some 35 years. Not bad finishing out as the CEO of Paizo, a company which makes a rival product to D&D but personally, I really dislike Pathfinder‘s Second Edition because it’s too similar to the horrible Fourth Edition of D&D.
However this post is about praising her accomplishments and not airing grievances.
Although I’ve never known her personally, I do know Lisa was one of the smartest people in the D&D/Collectible Card Game business. I think her name and contributions should be immortalized alongside Gygax.
Lisa first crossed my radar around 1991-92 via her work with White Wolf’s first legitimate hit, Vampire: The Masquerade. Before this, White Wolf was just another wannabe that mostly talked shit about the dominant companies through their mediocre magazine. The legend is, Lisa is who saved the game from being a pathetic joke by having all the artwork replaced since it originally used more images in common with the Universal Monsters from the Thirties. Think Bela Lugosi. There was some validity to this as one of the main artists she hired was Tim Bradstreet, a guy my former employer GDW and Chicago’s FASA often hired, plus he used to live around Bloomington-Normal. Tim gave Wolf’s Vampire the modern look we often associate with vampires today: sunglasses, trench coats, long hair and the whole Emo thing. Lisa probably also pushed the game more toward Anne Rice’s stories than Horror. Never been my thing yet it sold and it did bring new people into gaming, so I applaud it even if many are the annoying Mall Goths.
She didn’t rest on her laurels though and left Wolf around 1992 (I think) to join Wizards of the Coast. Had I know this sooner, I would’ve invested heavily in Magic: The Gathering when I saw it debut at Gen Con in 1993. Yeah, I was there before it became D&D’s version of crack cocaine by the late Fall. Instead I stupidly dismissed Magic as cute and it might get by since its main “problem” was…it’s a Wizards of the Coast game. For most of Gen X, Mills and Z, let me explain. WOTC had been around for a while, maybe they started in the Eighties. I don’t recall seeing their main game Talislanta (sic) anywhere other than bookstores such as B Dalton or Waldenbooks. They had ads in Dragon plugging how this Fantasy RPG was different with the tagline, “No Elves.” So you could see how I made the error of the past is destiny. Either way, I wasn’t for me. In my opinion, it combined two of gamers’ uglier traits which get out of control: (obsessive) collecting and playing too often. With the latter, many D&D games got delayed thanks to one player getting caught up in a “quick” Magic session if the DM was late by five minutes.
Lisa’s skills and savvy turned the industry upside down in a few years. WOTC was making money hand over fist. Cards don’t really cost much to manufacture once you’ve paid the artists for all the rights to their work. As Magic was taking the world by storm, I had tuned out from gaming due to my relocation to Austin and my wounds from GDW needed more time to heal. Sadly, the D&D industry follows trends just like Movies, TV, Books, Music, etc. Numerous copycats appeared and many were licensed properties: Star Wars, Star Trek, Babylon 5, Lord of the Rings, etc. They began to crowd out the roleplaying games yet I think a few older companies’ demises or big layoffs happened through bad timing: GDW, WEG, SJG, FASA, Chaosium, Mayfair and even the 800-pound gorilla, TSR. When I got to attend Gen Con again and for the last time in 1998, the overall mood was pretty negative. Magic had started a bad trend and computer-based stuff was making serious inroads now that the Internet was becoming ubiquitous through Ultima Online, Warcraft/Starcraft and Everquest. You could say, Lisa had a hand in hurting the industry.
Fortunately, WOTC being crowned the new ruler in the business had a silver lining. They saved TSR from going under and being cannibalized as GDW was, aka, Marc Miller’s plan all along. Magic: the Gathering is what provided the millions to do it and having the South Park characters plug didn’t hurt. This led to Third Edition, my personal favorite, and the big Renaissance D&D received in the early Aughts plus a the best version of Star Wars and d20 Modern. Lisa ran the Star Wars line until she either quit or was laid off, it doesn’t matter since WOTC got devoured by Hasbro Toys around 2002. Hasbro, nick named Has Been Toys, is on par with IBM or AT&T in its incompetence. They haven’t really invented nor developed any new, good toys in decades. Instead they just gobble up rivals to stay relevant, especially Kenner for Star Wars and I think Milton Bradley for board games. In the Nineties, they almost bought up LEGO.
Anyway, Lisa wisely took advantage of Hasbro’s cost-cutting idiocy by forming Paizo which licensed D&D’s two big magazines, Dragon and Dungeon. The latter is a personal fave. I have every physical issue from when Third Edition started and ended. Paizo used the five years to gain experience at setting up their own licensed version, Pathfinder. Another smart move because D&D Fourth Edition was a steaming turd and the shortest edition published. Practically none of its DNA can be found in Fifth unlike First through Third.
I’ll wrap it up by wishing Lisa a happy retirement. Maybe I’ll get to Gen Con one day and have the opportunity to thank her in person for her part in saving D&D and running the best version of a Star Wars game ever made.