Today’s guest is a man who has had his fingers in some of the world’s biggest gaming pies. As a boy, he began with Risk! and miniatures and historical gaming, but in 1978 discovered Dungeons & Dragons, a moment that changed his life forever.
Setting out as a schoolboy with ambitions no higher than to be a successful dungeon master, his education and career followed a relatively conventional path into computer sciences and a highly respectable job at Boeing, until one day, he and some friends decided to set up a games company.
The name of that company was to become world-famous and associated with some of the most successful gaming products ever: Wizards of the Coast.
What followed was an extraordinary decade or more in which not only did Peter steer the extraordinary success of Magic the Gathering, but also formed a partnership with the makers of Pokemon and then, coming full circle, was able to step in and save TSR and the Dungeons & Dragons game he loves so much, making its 3rd Edition a phenomenal success and bringing in other publishers to create products supporting the brand.
After a career that many gamers would envy, Wizards was sold to Hasbro for a tidy sum and after staying on for a time to manage those brands, Peter now went to film school so that he could turn his attention to fulfilling a lifelong dream: turning one of his earliest D&D campaigns into a multimedia movie-making phenomenon – the World of Chaldea. Eight full-length episodes are already available, with more series planned for the future.
And as if that weren’t enough, Peter also has a majority stake in GenCon, the world’s biggest tabletop gaming event which, in 2019, drew around 70,000 visitors to Indianapolis!
Peter is a fantastic guest, brimming over with enthusiasm and happy to talk about his career in great depth, so it back and enjoy our transatlantic chat.
Henry
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