Prologue: Well? How did I Get Here?
The mid-90s were a heady time in the gaming sphere; the Internet was brand-new, there was this little indy game called Magic: The Gathering, and some nobodies from a company called White Wolf were producing a series of role-playing games set in the World of Darkness, with Vampire: The Masquerade being the top seller in that line.
I’d stopped playing rpgs in the early 90s, deciding instead that my time was better spent writing stories that I didn’t have to share with four other people at the table. It was fun for them, but it was no longer fun for me. Also: I needed a job. In 1994, I’d been working in the comics industry since 1988 as a retailer, first in Waco, and then in Austin. That’s not the greatest time period in history to be working in comics, and it’s no surprise that I was burned out (the “Death of Superman” storyline in 1993 was kinda the straw that broke the camel’s back).
Chessex was a company formed by Don Reents, who was something of a fixture in the Northern California gaming spaces. He was an avid chess and backgammon player who originally sold products out of the back of a van that he drove all around the Bay Area, selling to individual hobby shops. His original product line included imported chess sets (duh!), battlemats, and the big one, dice. Chessex was the first company to source and procure European-style dice, the ones with the rounded corners and edges. They were made out of urea, a plastic that becomes very hard under heat and pressure (they make toilet seats out of it). There were several manufacturers in Europe who were already set up to make dice, and so that’s where Don went to get them.
I don’t want to get into the weird history of game distribution, but there were a few regional outfits that provided for states (like Berkeley Game Distributors, who supplied all of California) and Wargames West and the Armory, who were technically national distributors, but were based out of one or two locations only. When Don decided to go big with Chessex, he opened warehouses across the country, strategically located to cover large areas and also back up each other.
Chessex Manufacturing (who made battlements and imported chess sets and dice) had two locations; Berkeley, Ca, and Longmont, Co. The first retail distribution warehouse that opened was (I believe) Chessex Midwest, in Indiana (the Midwest is lousy with game and hobby stores, most of which are run by a portly guy with a bad mustache named “Bob,” pronounced with a long, nasal-A sound, like “Baab.” If you heard Elwood Blues in your head saying, “We’ll talk to Baab,” then that’s the correct way to say it) and the Midwest Warehouse was followed by Chessex East, in Pennsylvania.
Don got to the market just in time to be a major distributor of Magic: The Gathering. It’s not possible to overstate the fervor and intensity that surrounded the game when it premiered. Mostly this was due to how the cards were produced (overseas, in small batches, at a card printer called Carta Mundi, which all but guaranteed that a supply and demand problem would arise). By 1995, Don opened a third warehouse, Chessex Southwest, in Austin, Texas. That warehouse took care of the whole state of Texas, Louisana and Arkansas, ensuring that anything shipped out of Austin was no more than 2 days away from its destination. Had that same store ordered from Wargames West, the ship time would have been a minimum of 2 days and possibly 3 or 4. Chessex was faster, well-stocked, and reliable.
It’s around this point in time that I left comics for gaming. I got my start at Chessex Southwest in sales; I got the job because my roommate Weldon had already made the jump from comics to gaming and was the sales manager. He was busily hiring people he knew he could trust to be personable on the phone and also knowledgeable about the product.
Chessex had quickly become the largest game distributor in the United States. Don built the company up, seemingly overnight, and Chessex had the reach, both in terms of shipping and handling, and also in terms of money. In addition to all of the other games and accessories they were moving through three warehouses, Chessex Manufacturing was doing gangbusters with their dice, their battlemats, and their other varied accessories. They had other ambitions out there in Berkeley, as well. Weldon made a lateral move from Chessex Southwest as the sales manager, moving all the way out to Berkeley to become their new head of research and development, a title he fought for and used honorably. I was still in Austin, selling Magic cards and more or less enjoying it. The work was easy.
Then one day, I got a call from Weldon, out in Berkeley.
“I need you out here,” he said.
“I miss you, too, buddy,” I replied.
“No, not that,” he said, speaking quietly into the phone. “I need you out here with me. I’m surrounded out here. I have no idea how… you don’t understand… these people…” I could hear him struggling to be understood and I knew what was going on. He was having trouble coming up with words he could say very quietly that weren’t outright profanity.
“Is it that bad?” I asked.
“I just came out of a meeting where I was told by someone here, ‘You know, Weldon, you’re not the only one here who can think up things.’”
“Is this person in R&D with you?”
“No!” he said it at normal volume, but it sounded much louder. “She’s our proofreader,” he said. “You know, the one who let all of those errors go through on the book we just printed?”
“Oh, that’s fun,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said, “I told her that I was the only person here with ‘R&D’ in front of my name, and not ‘proofreader.”
“How did that go over?”
“Not well. I was told I was being ‘difficult.’”
“Would you be less difficult if I were out there?”
“Well, for one, I wouldn’t have to remind you what your job was. What we need out here is an editor-in-chief,” he said.
“I could do that,” I said.
“Yes, you could,” said Weldon. “I need an ally.”
Three months later, I was driving to Berkeley, California in a 17-feet long U-Haul crammed with 21-feet worth of stuff.