How many households owned D&D in 1981-1983? • Collecting General • The Acaeum

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How many households owned D&D in 1981-1983?
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Tav_Behemoth
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Posted: Sat Aug 28, 2010 10:19 am

I'm writing an article for the Escapist's Issue 271: The Red Box Diaries, "How a decades-long love affair with Dungeons & Dragons is reshaping the industry." (Here's a link to my previous piece for them, D&D is the Apocalypse)

As part of that, I'd like to try to sketch a sense of how popular D&D was when the Moldvay Red Box was released in '81, or the Mentzer set in '83. The other cultural references I've found as benchmarks are that 41 million households watched the 'who shot J.R.' episode of Dallas in '80, and that 14 million households had a home video game unit in '82, so it'd be nice if I can get numbers that can be translated into that scale. However, any kind of figures would be great; guesses are fine, esp. if you can give the basis for your guess.

Thanks for help, or pointers to threads where this has already been discussed!

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Posted: Sat Aug 28, 2010 10:45 am

Well, I can personally vouch for about two dozen households.

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Zenopus
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Posted: Sat Aug 28, 2010 10:59 am

This Acaeum page compiles printing estimates from various sources:
http://www.acaeum.com/library/printrun.html

Nothing specific about the Basic sets, but it does include:

B2 Keep on the Borderlands: 1,000,000+. Source: 1999 Silver Anniversary Retrospective booklet

I'd guess that the majority of these B2s were ones included in the Holmes & Moldvay box sets (it was sold separately, however).

lokiwookie
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Posted: Sat Aug 28, 2010 11:03 am

Zenopus wrote:This Acaeum page compiles printing estimates from various sources:
http://www.acaeum.com/library/printrun.html

Thanks for the link! Very interesting. I never looked at this page before.

1,000,000 of B2... Nice score!

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HexMapper
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Posted: Sat Aug 28, 2010 11:38 am

Pretty sure to account for another half-dozen households during the time span.

Zenopus
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Posted: Sat Aug 28, 2010 12:27 pm

lokiwookie wrote:
Thanks for the link! Very interesting. I never looked at this page before.

1,000,000 of B2... Nice score!

You're welcome. If you go up a level, there's the "Library" page with links to all sorts of interesting pages.

http://www.acaeum.com/library/library.html

puterdragon
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Posted: Sat Aug 28, 2010 1:12 pm

I wonder if there's a business registry of game stores and retail-sales information on which extrapolations could be based. This approach might be another option to using print runs.

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FormCritic
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Posted: Sat Aug 28, 2010 1:48 pm

To get the number of players, multiply the number of B2 modules sold by four or five.

There were lots of established groups that did not purchase the red box.

For every red box out there you could easily guess three to five more players.

So, 4 x B2 Ownership = 4,000,000+

That seems conservative.

When you factor in that a fair cross-section of the most intelligent students at any given American high school were playing D&D you get a profound impact of one game on the most influential innovators and thinkers.

When you add Canada and Western Europe into the mix the total impact is slightly diluted, but still significant.

"But I have watched the dragons come, fire-eyed, across the world."

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Posted: Sat Aug 28, 2010 2:18 pm

Tav_Behemoth wrote:(Here's a link to my previous piece for them, D&D is the Apocalypse)

Good article, Tavis. :salut:

I especially like the discussion of D&D as a vehicle for enjoying a bit of anarchy. The sharpest component of the appeal of D&D was/is the ability to get away from encroaching social rules and just kill some stuff. It is the same joy-in-destruction theme central to the appeal of the Zombie Apocalypse genre.

This is also why...counter-intuitvely...you will find a fair percentage of people from devout, Protestant backgrounds in the D&D mix. Logic would presume that few teenagers from churches in the Moral Majority would ever have braved the satanic hype. The opposite is true. This is because D&D poses the challenge of John Lennon's lyrics, "Imagine there's no heaven," in a reachable and safe manner. Good boys get to be bad boys: "Imagine there's no Sunday School tomorrow. It's easier with dice."

The cliche' of D&D as a vehicle for whimpy nerd-revenge is overdone...and not really applicable once you actually start to meet gamers. Anarchy appeals to jocks, techies, Goths, geeks and sometimes even to prom queens. All of them played D&D. The most common denominator was not social awkwardness but the IQ and emotional intelligence to think large and have fun in places that do not exist.

"But I have watched the dragons come, fire-eyed, across the world."

Midian_Beasttoothe
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Posted: Sat Aug 28, 2010 10:37 pm

1981, 8th print Basic set (E Otis cover) in my household. This was my first taste.

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Tav_Behemoth
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Posted: Sat Aug 28, 2010 10:39 pm

Thanks for the pointers to data, and the kind words on the previous article! The anarchy idea, like many good ones, comes from S. John Ross. I'll post a link to the new article when it goes up on the Escapist site next month.

My personal data point is 1980, Holmes Basic set, B2 and chits instead of dice.

Zenopus
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Posted: Sun Aug 29, 2010 4:30 pm

Calithena wrote:From "It's Only A Game...Or Is It?", Moira Johnston, New West, August 25, 1980:

"Gygax, a former shoe-repairman, insurance underwriter, unpublished novelist and unemployed gaming enthusiast, describes the phenomenal growth of D&D. 'In 1979 we sold a quarter of a million copies of the basic D&D set, a little better than double over 1978. Our gross sales volume has gone from $150,000 in 1975 to $2.5 million in 1979. We expect to double or triple everything this year.' Although FRP games still rank behind electronic games in national popularity, 'D&D is now equal to any boardgame, including Monopoly', says Dana Lombardy, whose games column in Virginia-based Model Retailer magazine has closely monitored the rise of D&D and FRP. The most stunning measure of growth, Lombardy reports, is that 'of a total national FRP games market of $20 million in 1980, TSR will account for more than $5 million of that - at least 25 percent!' FRP wasn't even listed as a games category in 1974."

Mars wrote:There are a number of different sources with numbers like this. Some of the dealer catalogs and press kits include this kind of information. I believe the 1983 catalog has a bunch of that kind of stuff:

http://tomeoftreasures.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4098

as well as a number of later ones.

From this thread:
viewtopic.php?t=8598

Zenopus
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Posted: Sun Sep 05, 2010 10:30 am

Grognardia posted some quotes from a summer of 1980 interview with Gygax that indicate that 12,000 copies of the Basic Set (Holmes) were being sold per month at that time:

http://grognardia.blogspot.com/2010/09/12000-month.html

This would be ~240,000 copies per year, which is in line with the quarter of a million number mentioned in the 1983 retailer catalog for the year of 1979.

Four years (1977-1980) of sales would place the Holmes Basic set at a total of ~1 million copies sold (probably less in the beginning of that time period, but TSR also continued to sell it after 1980).

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