Dice Men

'Dice Men'
The Origin Story of Games Workshop

by Ian Livingstone with Steve Jackson

Unbound (UK), 2022

Anyone with familiarity with Anglophone science fiction and fantasy media is aware of Games Workshop, a UK firm with a juggernaut presence in the world not only of tabletop gaming, but video gaming, too. Games Workshop also ran / runs  the Black Library and Solaris book publishing imprints.

What I didn't know is that Games Workshop began back in 1975 as the brainchild of three Manchester residents and grammar school chums who met, and discovered a mutual liking for board games: Ian Livingstone, Steve Jackson (not to be confused with the Steve Jackson from Austin, Texas) and John Peake.

'Dice Men' is a memoir, authored by Livingstone with contributions from Jackson and other Games Workshop employees and gaming world luminaries, of the founding of the company, all the way up to 1991.

Although priced at barely $20 at amazon, at 297 pages in length this is a formidable book, measuring 8 1/5 x 12 inches, with study hardbound covers and high-quality, thick paper stock.

Livingstone is a capable writer and he tells the story of Games Workshop's early days in a conversational, flowing style that touches the right notes of nostalgia without lapsing into sentimentality.

The book is copiously illustrated with scans and photographs of vintage periodicals such as the Owl and Weasel newsletter, which morphed into White Dwarf in 1977. There are photos of gaming conventions and personalities from the early era, as well as portraits - if you could call them that - of the large library of RPG figurines the company produced in the 1970s and 1980s. 

I particularly enjoyed Livingstone's account of a summer, 1976 trip that he, Jackson, and some friends and fellow employees made to the U.S. They drove across the country to California, taking in the sights, and then turned around for a rendezvous with Gary Gygax and TSR at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, in August. It was a road trip inspired, according to Livingstone, by the Kerouac novel 'On the Road'.

As someone who was 16 years old in 1976, I found this part of the book to be a powerful shot of nostalgia, and an interesting look at America as it was in the mid-1970s. It brought me new appreciation for that time, and that place. 

One aspect of the company history that the book tends to be rather self-effacing about, is the fact that Livingstone and Jackson, while bereft of MBA degrees (or much in the way of formal training and experience in business, period), took their creation from very humble beginnings into a very successful corporation. This is particularly true when the book recounts the Workshop's interactions with TSR, who made overtures towards buying the company. There were times when much money was dangled in the faces of the Games Workshop executives, but they decided not to cash in, and instead focused on the long term success of their company. 

This was no small achievement in the era before venture capitalism and investment firms. One only has to think of how TSR overextended itself, and experienced financial problems, in the mid-1980s, and sowed the seeds of later bankruptcy, to realize that the tabletop gaming industry could be a fragile enterprise. It was Jackson's habitual caution in making business decisions that helped keep Games Workshop not only solvent, but prosperous. 

The book recounts the rise, and tremendous success, in the early 1980s of the 'Fighting Fantasy' line of books designed to introduce younger people to the world of RPGs. The books met with some condemnation from religious activists with the UK's 'Evangelical Alliance', who warned that the material would promote Satanic practices (!).

Livingstone's history of his personal involvement in Games Workshop ends on something of a melancholy note, as 1986 saw he and Jackson ceding greater control of the day-to-day running of the company to others. In 1991, Workshop executives and part-owners Bryan Ansell, Tom Kirby, and Keith Pinfold became convinced that the future of Games Workshop lay with selling the company to the private equity firm ECI Partners. Livingstone and Jackson were less than enthused about the idea, but as minority shareholders they eventually capitulated to the pressure from the other owners, and sold their shares and completed the buyout. 

That decision ended their involvement with the company they had created back in 1975 in a flat on the top floor of a house on Bolingbroke Road in West London. In fairness to Ansell, Kirby, and Pinfold, the acquisition by ECI gave Games Workshop the capital it needed to become its present-day £3 billion firm, and for their part, Livingstone and Jackson went on to fame and prosperity in the world of computer and video gaming. 

Who will want a copy of 'Dice Men' ? Needless to say, UK fans of tabletop and RPG games will want their copy. But I also think it's a useful addition to observations of popular culture in the UK and the USA during the 1970s and 1980s, as well as a good overview of how one can go from a startup company manned by a handful of people in a tiny office, to a resounding corporate success. In other words, it shows the best side of the economic enterprise we know as Capitalism !