Game Wizards might be subtitled "never meet your heroes".  TTRPGs are one of my primary hobbies. D&D turned 50 in 2024, and both Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson are credited as inventive geniuses behind the hobby. Peterson's history reveals legal and corporate battles and every manner of personality flaw, as the battle between the 'founders' of D&D played out in courts and the hobbyist press.

In the early 1970s, Gygax and Arneson were both serious amateur gamers. Gygax had written a medieval wargame called Chainmail, and idly added some fantastic elements from sword and sorcery books and Lord of the Rings.  Arneson used Chainmail to run the Dungeon of Blackmoor, an unconventional game where many participants each controlled a single unit against Arneson's traps and monsters. The two of them decided that they had something, and wrote up a little pamphlet called Dungeons and Dragons. Together with a local gamer and machinist, Brian Blume, they scraped together a few thousands dollars for a print run and began selling the game to the small but intense community of wargamers.

What they had was a spark that lit that community on fire. D&D expanded exponentially year over year, along with the company, TSR, that Gygax and Blume had founded to publish it.  But the partnership fractured almost as quickly as it was founded. Arneson moved to the small town of Lake Geneva to help with the company, but wound up doing grunt labor in the shipping department rather than creative work (Arneson's creative work, or lack thereof, is another issue).  The two 'cocreators' split up, and the hastily drafted royalty agreement between the two amateurs would provide fodder for a decade of lawsuits.

Arneson drifted around the community, promising and continuously failing to write multiple new games, and complaining that Gygax was stealing his credit and money to anyone that would listen. Meanwhile. Gygax was acting the big man, a star at gaming conventions who started breaking out into the mainstream as D&D became a fad in 1980s. TSR grew rapidly as well, employing hundreds of people and dozens of relatives of both Gygax and Blume. Gygax picked fights with every other company in the industry, liberally threatening lawsuits over unenforceable rules and arguing that if it wasn't TSR and official D&D, it was crap. 

Gygax wasn't much of a manager by his own admission. But he also wasn't much of a creative. It's hard to say what words or ideas he contributed to the game after say, 1977. He spent most of the 1980s in California, trying without success to turn D&D into a movie. Meanwhile, he went from abject poverty to owning a 29 acre horse estate with a mansion, to a messy divorce.  When TSR hit headwinds in 1984, the ramshackle corporate governance and uncontrolled spending turned into a hemorrhage. Gygax met Lorraine Williams, heir to the Buck Rogers IP, and she forced him out in a coup in 1985.

A secondary theme is the Satanic Panic. D&D was associated with the disappearance of a troubled MSU student, and was blamed by opportunistic Moral Majority types for corrupting the youth and teaching real witchcraft.  Ironically, both Gygax and Arneson were devout Christians (well, Gygax was a Jehovah's Witness, but close enough.) There were some minor changes around divine and supernatural themes, but the controversy likely helped spread the game.

The story revealed in Game Wizards is of two men who had an odd idea, and who were consumed by their success. Neither ever didn't anything close to as significant as D&D.  I'm unclear if Arneson did anything later in his life. Gygax's jealousy of other designers and fruitless obsession with a movie doesn't come off well either. But by the late 1990s, when D&D was purchased by Wizards of the Coast, enough time had passed that the two could be wheeled out as grand old men of the hobby.