Category:TSR

TSR, Inc. was a game publishing company best known for publishing Dungeons & Dragons and AD&D. They were purchased in 1997 by Wizards of the Coast, the publisher of Magic: The Gathering card games. The name TSR is no longer used for the company's products, having been phased out between 1999 and 2003.

In 1985, after seeing the success of the Ultima series, TSR decided to offer its license to game developers. In 1987, Strategic Simulations won the license for AD&D against 9 other competing bidders (including Electronic Arts and Sierra). The early results were the Gold Box games, which shared a common engine and were named for the gold boxes in which most of the games were sold. As SSI began work on a new engine (called Dark Sun), they also formed a partnership with AOL and created a multiplayer version of the Gold Box engine, which was used to create the first graphical MMORPG, Neverwinter Nights (AOL), released in 1991.

The first game to use Dark Sun, Dark Sun: Shattered Lands, was released late and in a buggy state. There were additional titles using the Dark Sun engine, but sales continued to decline, and SSI along with them.

The resurgence of the AD&D rules and worlds, in the 1990s, was due largely to TSR's licensing to BioWare and Black Isle Studios with the releases of the Baldur's Gate series, the Icewind Dale series, the Neverwinter Nights series, and other critically-acclaimed titles, such as Planescape: Torment.