At 82 years old and with her days of fantasy writing far behind her, Rose Estes, the owner of The Hauser Gallery in Seal Rock, was surprised to learn she was being honored for her first series, a set of choose-your-own-adventure books from 1980 that kicked off her 38-book career.
On March 16, Estes was contacted by Michael Elliot, the curator for the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts and Design Hall of Fame. Estes had never heard of the academy, and for a brief moment thought the email might be part of some sort of elaborate scam. But with a little online sleuthing, she was able to verify the group as a division of the Game Manufacturer’s Association, a nonprofit organization that organizes one of the oldest annual gaming trade shows in the U.S.
In his email, Elliot explained the academy had recently spoken with its members and a role-playing game historian about the early history of tabletop gaming and found Estes’ work to be an important contribution to the early popularity of tabletop role-playing games. Elliot credited Estes’ work for drawing countless people into the hobby and helping make the $12-billion industry what it is today.
This came as a surprise to Estes, who was never a gamer herself, though decades ago she worked at one of the best known tabletop gaming companies in the industry’s history: TSR Hobbies, the company responsible for the first edition of the iconic Dungeons & Dragons.
Estes was hired as TSR’s 13th employee and wore many hats during her time there, but her most notable achievement was writing the first installments of the “Endless Quest” series of choose-your-own-adventure books, which sold millions of copies and continue to this day under different authors, with the latest installments published in 2019.
Though she’s yet to be formally added to the wall on academy’s online hall of fame, Estes was inducted on June 11. She now stands among some of the titans of the tabletop gaming industry, from famous fantasy authors such as R.A. Salvatore to her former boss, Gary Gigax, creator of Dungeons & Dragons.
The News-Times could not reach Elliot or anyone affiliated with the academy for additional comment, but information about the academy and its hall of fame can be found at https://www.originsawards.net/hall-of-fame.
Estes was born in Chicago, but moved to Houston, at a young age when a doctor told her Russian immigrant parents she couldn’t take the cold winters of Illinois, though she later returned. She acquired a formal education from the University of Chicago and later worked at various newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune and Houston Chronicle.
Estes’ life took a major turn in the late 1970s when her marriage ended and she needed to find a way to take care of her three children alone.
“When me and my first husband married, he neglected to tell me he was in line to become a fifth generation chocolatier, which would take us to Wisconsin,” Estes said. “He later decided he didn’t want to be married anymore, and I was left with a newborn, a 3 year old and a 5 year old to take care of.”
Living in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, Estes had to make a difficult choice. She could either return to work at the Tribune and take the four-hour round trip into Chicago each day, or sign on with a local company that wasn’t paying very well, but didn’t have a commute.
“TSR had just bought this old hotel in the center of town, and I answered an ad they had in the newspaper,” Estes said. “I didn’t really have a specific job when I showed up. I was told it was a new company and everyone just needed to wear what hats were needed.”
Estes said the first thing that needed to be done was to talk to people who were calling in with questions about the game, many of whom had less-than-friendly demeanors.
“I was talking to ministers, teachers and parents who apparently thought we were leading their children into demon worship,” Estes said. “It was a difficult task, especially since I didn’t play the game myself. The rest of the company was so new and so unaware of how the rest of the world works, they thought if you just didn’t answer the phone or talk to any reporters, then the whole thing would go away. Instead, it just got worse and worse.”
In the early ’80s, much of the U.S. was caught up in The Satanic Panic, an event in which more than 12,000 mostly unsubstantiated stories of Satanic ritual abuse — a catch-all phrase for various alleged demonic worship activities — swept the nation and inspired a wave of cultural hysteria.
Dungeons & Dragons, a game where players usually take the role of heroes fighting against monsters, demons and evildoers, was a prime target of these accusations. Estes said at one point, TSR’s building was so surrounded by a mob of reporters, protesters and onlookers that it was difficult to get inside.
While that controversy was ongoing, Estes took her kids to a traveling circus on her day off and ran into someone she knew, the owner, Manuel King, whom she had known growing up in Houston. Estes said King invited her to accompany the circus for a while and, thinking it would be an interesting experience that she could write a few articles about, Estes asked for a month-long leave of absence from TSR, which was granted.
“It was wonderful and quite the experience,” Estes said. “I got to ride on the head of an elephant in the grand parade and everything.”
But that trip proved to be pivotal in Estes’ career for a different reason. While visiting a laundromat, Estes was perusing a set of books and came across a choose-your-own-adventure book, “The Stone of Time,” by R. A. Montgomery. Flipping through, she was struck with inspiration.
Estes thought a book like this, where readers would make choices and flip to a corresponding page to continue down different paths of the story, would be perfect to describe to people what Dungeon & Dragons was about, taking the role of a fictional hero and making choices that affected a story.
Estes purchased the book and returned to Lake Geneva soon after, where she pitched the idea to her bosses at TSR. She said their initial reaction was dismissive, and most of the higher ups at the company, young men who spent their days designing tabletop games and their nights playing them, were more concerned with writing and publishing game modules.
“I said, ‘We should really do this, it would help people understand the game easy,’” Estes said. “But they were not interested, at all.”
But Estes persisted with the idea until one of her bosses became “fed up” and told her that if she thought it was such a good idea, she should write it herself, which she did, and threw it onto his desk one morning.
“They basically told me, ‘Shut up or put up,’ and that made me mad, so I went home and I did,” Estes said.
After writing the book, bringing it in and throwing it on her supervisor’s desk, Estes said it sat there for three months until the company met with its publisher, Penguin Random House, which asked if they had any new products, aside from new game modules. Her supervisor mentioned the book Estes wrote and it immediately grabbed Random House’s interest.
“Bantam (another publisher) had published their own series of choose-your-owns, and Random House certainly knew how well they’d done,” Estes said. “They said they wanted it, but they didn’t just want one. If it did well, then the author could jack the price up, so they always wanted four.”
That meeting was on Jan. 1 and Estes’ supervisor came to her, dropped the manuscript on her desk and told her to write three more by March 1, which she did.
The books, most of which were written on legal pads, were published and proved to be a huge success.
“As of 1988, the first six books sold 16 million copies, and some are still being reprinted today,” Estes said. “It was after that they made the big mistake of taking me to the American Bookseller’s Convention.”
Estes said she was assailed by publishers interested in having her write books for them and eventually, despite having grown attached to TSR, she decided it was time to move on.
“The company meant something, and from when I began, you could feel there was something big that was going somewhere there,” Estes said. “I liked the people, maybe not so much all the game designers, but I made a lot of good friends there.”
But things at TSR were becoming chaotic as founding members began feuding over control and the future of the company. Before she left, Estes read the first draft of Gigax’s Greyhawk novel series, which she completed herself when she was ousted from the company.
Estes later accepted an offer from Ballantine Publishing to write more choose-your-own-adventure books, including an Indiana Jones and Lord of the Rings series, though she said the latter wasn’t approved by the Tolkien estate and so never saw the light of day.
Estes kept writing fantasy novels until 1994, when a head injury from a car accident damaged the part of her brain responsible for vocabulary. Estes said she had several outstanding novel contracts at the time, but quickly lost them without the ability to write, though she eventually finished two out of three books in her final series, “Troll Taken” and “Troll Quest,” which she considers her best work.
Estes went on to marry Gary Hauser, of Seal Rock, in early 2001 after she initially contacted him to commission a work of art she saw on his website. The two began talking online every day and eventually got married, to the surprise of Estes’ children, who weren’t in the loop, but came to approve of Hauser after meeting him.
Hauser passed away in 2006, but Estes said their time together inspired her to write two more books, non-fiction works about the history of the Chow and Terrier dog breeds.
These days, she continues to run The Hauser Gallery in Seal Rock, where one can find artwork from around the world, gemstones and copies of the many books Estes has written, many of which have are in high demand with the recent upsurge in the popularity of Dungeons & Dragons.
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