It included a gaming store, complete with life-size statues of characters from "Star Wars" and Magic; a video arcade populated by panhandling street kids who looked like extras from "Blade Runner"; a virtual reality gaming area with climb-in cockpit pods for networked giant robot battles; a Planet Hollywood-style restaurant, Dalmuti's, decorated in a gaming theme; and in the massive basement, a sort of community center for gamers stocked with tables, chairs and the kind of plush curtains and heraldic banners suited to an Errol Flynn movie -- or dinner with the kids at Medieval Times. In this subterranean paradise Wizards hosted a steady stream of card game tournaments and other events, including Microsoft's 1998 Age of Empires computer game championships.

Over the stairway that led down to Ye Olde Gaming Hall loomed a massive sculpture of a Minotaur head. When the store closed, unable to generate sufficient profits for Wizards' new corporate owner, Hasbro, impatient workmen pried the head off the wall in chunks, escorting them to the curb, where they awaited an uncertain fate.

The store had been the Xanadu of geekdom, erected by gaming's own Kublai Khan: Peter Adkison, founder of Wizards and a cherubic visionary who imagined a better, more goblin-infested world where gamers played games and no one gave them wedgies.

I worked at Wizards back in its halcyon days, when we all bought into Peter's vision. Today, as I watch the carnage wrought upon another crop of idealistic and iconoclastic start-ups -- the new-economy dot-coms -- it is hard to escape the feeling that the story of Peter and his company, Wizards of the Coast, stands as an eerie prototype for the entire dot-com experience. Wizards blazed a trail through corporate culture that turned old notions of professionalism and workplace community on their head in the pursuit of a Utopian ideal where geeks would be rich, be cool and get laid. Unlike the dot-coms, however, Wizards survived and even thrived because Peter learned an important lesson early on: Kill your illusions before they kill you.

Once a humble Boeing aerospace drone, Peter founded Wizards in 1990 to publish "The Primal Order," a role-playing game book intended as a generic add-on to whatever game you were already playing. "Primal Order" was all about deities and pantheons, the power-heavy end of the fantasy role-playing spectrum. Among other things, it provided formulas for esoterica such as how many trolls were praying to their god in a given month -- chicken soup for the soul of many gamers. Peter wrote much of the book himself and assembled a coterie of enthusiastic, aspiring young professionals to bring it to market in their spare time.

An appendix inadvertently packed with copyright violations landed the fledgling basement operation in hot legal water with Palladium, a competing publisher whose game was referenced without permission in "The Primal Order." Palladium sued.

While the court process dragged on, Peter and his friends turned to a greener pasture. Mathematician Richard Garfield had conceived a revolutionary product: a collectible card game, with customizable decks and a distribution system of common and rare cards sold in slim packs like baseball cards. To build a better deck, you had to buy or trade more cards. And although Garfield intended the scheme to be an interesting exercise in metagame design, its potential as a financial gravy train was also an intriguing factor.

As a legal shelter from the copyright-infringement case, Peter set up a new corporation, Garfield Games, which developed what came to be Magic: The Gathering. Garfield Games then licensed the production and sale rights to Wizards until the court case was settled, at which point the shell company was shut down. It was a sterling piece of gamesmanship that kept the valuable new property shielded from the courts, the corporate equivalent of three-card monte.

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