Kaskoid wrote:Ahh, the folly of ignorance and youth....

On the "interview": Hmmm, is that so? Interesting take on the very earliest days of the company (the first five, when I was there) for someone who had no hand in running it, making any marketing decisions and was seldom about the place.

I should also qualify that by saying that when I started playing, in the late '70's, AD&D and Holmes Basic were the only games being sold in the stores I went to. Our only awareness of OD&D was from back issues of Dragon mag.

sauromatian wrote:
OD&D (mostly supplements rather than the white box) was definitely present at every toy & game store in early-'80s Houston, including one (The Game Player at Sharpstown Mall) that opened in '79. The mainstream bookstores (B. Dalton & Waldenbooks) carried Chainmail. None of the kids my age played it or OD&D. I always found the references in Dragon Magazine confusing - why would Greyhawk, which everyone knows is a campaign setting, be so important for basic game mechanics?

I never saw it around here in Western Washington.

There was a stationary store, a toy store, and a hobby store where I got all my stuff from. No OD&D anywhere in sight. I do recall later on bookstores and dept. stores started carryimg AD&D stuff when it was at its height of popularity.

I first played with Moldvay. I don't recall Holmes or OD&D being available in the UK in Games Stores. I think OD&D and Holmes basic were available mostly mail order through Games Workshop and the likes, and I don't think there were many GW stores outside of London at the time.

I do remember the Mentzer Basic set coming out and thinking it was an awful departure from Moldvay, partly on account to the tacky red presentation of the set, but by that time we'd moved onto AD&D anyhow.

My experience was pretty similar.  My only money was from allowance, and the more chores I did the more money I had.  After we moved to Colorado Springs in 1979 I found out about Miniature World, and my parents started noticing an exponential growth in chore completion  

My first modules were B2, S2 and Q1, in that order.  I based my purchases on how cool the covers were and how much the guys in the store said they liked the module.  I didn't have any hardcovers until 1981 because spending $12-15 instead of $4-5 on a purchase was a huge delayed investment and the game was on next weekend.  It was hard to make our own stuff when evenings were spent on homework and we couldn't get together until Friday, so modules were our bread and butter for several years.

One day, when I had some more money from a birthday and helping friends' families, I asked about the strange white box (the only one left).  Me - Do I need this?  Owner (knowing all my purchases) - Not anymore, no.  Me - Is there anything in here that I haven't seen yet?  Owner - Nope.  So I bought 3 modules.  

And that was life 1979-1982.  The only original edition stuff I bought was the Geomorphs and Monster & Treasure Assortments, because they apparently didn't sell well and were the only OD&D left.  I got a lot of play out of them and became interested in the original edition.  One of my friends who had family in Indiana had a more historical interest in the game (at age 11, no less), and came back with Chainmail, the Supplements and a few other odds and ends.  I asked him what they were like, and he said they had a few cool pieces of art but otherwise he felt that he had wasted his money.

And so did the generation gap / edition wars in D&D begin ...

sauromatian wrote:This discussion has me wondering - why was OD&D a common sight in early-'80s Houston, but apparently not in most other places? Earlier I said "every" toy/hobby store carried it, not absolutely literally true (Toys R Us had only recent product), but a bunch of them did.

How did this happen - was there a larger D&D community early on in 1970s Houston, or was there a game distributor in the region who pushed them to retailers?

What about Chainmail at B. Dalton & Waldenbooks stores through the mid-'80s? Does everyone remember that?

Nope. Never saw it in those stores. The only place I have seen it in store, was behind a glasd case in a used comic book store. I think it was the whole set plus supplements. This was in the early '90s. Now I wish I had bought it.

mbassoc2003 wrote:...snip....Marketing and distribution were rather esoteric in the late 70's.

Esoteric does not quite describe the situation. Words like redundant, chaotic, fragmented, confused and clueless come to mind more readily for me.

You can probably attribute the prevalence in one market and the dearth in another to the distributors and their belief, or lack thereof, in the future of the product. Early on, small and medium distributors saw the potential in the game. (Not all of them, obviously, or we would have gone ballistic, sales-wise, sooner.) There were no really big distributors then; those existing then seldom did anything beyond very localized, or at best small-region, efforts. It was the demise of huge numbers of small Mom & Pop hobby stores, as well as a huge percentage of small and medium distributors of what hobby stores sell, during the failure of Reagonomics in the early 80's, that opened the door for bigger, more efficient distributors. It also forced producers to try to get into big stores such as Waldenbooks and the like.

Advertising, perhaps?

I recall radio spots for the TSR line of games, and TV spots for the LJN toy line, but I have no recollection of ever seeing the TV commercial for the game. This would all have been roughly 1983-ish. OD&D, and even Holmes, would have been things of the past by this point.

I never saw a white box in the store for sale until the early 80s.  The only copies I had seen up until then were copies owned by salty older DM types who would sometimes appear at local hobby stores running games.  Our local games outlet in the late 70's were hobby stores, particularly Hobbies for Dad and Lad which had a mall outlet and where I bought nearly everything I ever used, gaming wise, until the bigger bookstores started carrying D&D. The only older TSR stuff I remember seeing was Chainmail (which, sadly, I passed up as it appeared to be a miniatures game and not an essential D&D item) and the Swords & Spells supplement (which I did pick up, for some reason).  The other supplements were gathered in later years at used bookstores.  While everything TSR was available, non-TSR stuff (Judges Guild, etc) had very spotty distribution in the DFW area during that time.  While I picked up copies of City State of the World Emperor, Verbosh, and Caverns of Thracia, it was a full decade later (90s) until I found Dark Tower, Tarantis, City State of the Invincible Overlord (a complete copy, I had partials), and many other JG standards through the emerging online market.

Mike B.