All of this? I didn't say they didn't exist. I did say many didn't have access to them. That was the key difference. You had to live in an area that would have a store, and then that store would have to stock all of those more obscure games. Unless it was a big city, I never saw it. There was no internet to order games from. If you got a hold of a catalog, you waited 6-8 weeks to get what you ordered (no PRIME then!). And DRAGON only came out once a month (or once every two months), and didn't address all the ambiguities in D&D, but maybe a couple things. So for the vast majority of rules questions, you made them up at your own table. You weren't going to put your game on hold for months hoping that your letter would be answered... Yes, rules lawyers existed, but they seemed to be very few and oft reviled. Now they have their own websites and gaming forums dedicated to rules lawyering.
I didn't see EPT until the 2000's, myself, but did read about it in the 80's...
The local military base had, in the garden center, a rack of D&D stuff. It had both Holmes and AD&D in '79, and added Moldvay in '81.
My local grocer (Long's Drugs) had a full aisle of gaming supplies. I saw Dallas while looking at boardgames in '80 or so. I bought my first copy of Moldvay at Long's. I bought several adventures at Long's. I could have bought T&T, had the box been less cryptic.
I got into TFT in winter 1984 - during an ice storm - and proceeded to buy it at the local chain book store,
The Book Cache. Melee. Then Wizard. Then AW. Then AM. I couldn't find a copy of ITL, but had enough of it in Dragons of Underearth to run TFT. I didn't have an actual ITL until the 90's... I saw Mechanoids in 1982... but passed because I thought it was a comic book. (I eventually got dead tree of the trilogy... but the low quality paper... ugh... acid migration. I got all three for the cover price of the first)
Anchorage was as big as it got in Alaska - at the time, 175K or so. (Now, it's 350K, and is still as big as it gets.) But, until the mid-80's, it had no dedicated game stores. It had hobby stores and book stores which carried RPG books...
Even the one surviving game store was never solely games... Boscos was, at the time, just a comic & sportscards shop, which, in the mid-80's, added used games, then added new ones, to now where half the store is games, 1/4 is comics, and the rest is split between collectibles and sportscards.
We came to Corvallis a number of times in my youth, so I was aware of Trump's Hobbies there, too. (Now, I live outside of Corvallis.) The dedicated game stores date to the 90's in Corvallis, too. Matt's, like Bosco's, is games, comics, sportscards, collectibles. Gamagora is a nice pay-to-use playspace with some games. Pegasus is a card-crack shop with some boardgames. Trump's still primarily models and RC, but has a small, curated set of board games, some card crack (sealed boosters and starters only, from what I can tell) and a few RPG items dating back to the 00's. (The copy of blue planet had a damaged price sticker in 2004... and it's still on the shelf.)
So, no, it's not just "big cities"... I mean, the worst rules-raping gygaxians I've met were amongst my own age group, fueled by Dragon... and claiming Andrew, myself, Aaron, John, Brian and Brice were doing it wrong. And a few of the older kids, convinced D&D was just a minis game, also said we were doing it wrong, playing theater of the mind or with sketches only... It was a white, upper middle class neighborhood, with no less than 6 groups playing summer of '81. (I only knew of 4... the above mentioned crew, then Sam, Paul and myself, then Andrew's older brother's group... which wasn't Peter's group, and I found out about the group Peter was in when Peter and I became friends in spring of 1985. I found out about another group in the 90's, from a former neighbor who was playing.
Now, Anchorage was and is unusual in that it was a college town , a military town, and a government town, all at once, not to mention a major water and air port. (Many state offices are actually in Anchorage, not the capital.)
Corvallis was and is a college town. It's part of a sprawling multi-city conurbation... Philomath, Corvallis, and Albany all run together.
But I know as well that, in 1981, there were no less than 2 groups in Palmer, and 4 in/near Wasilla, then both small towns, because of gamers I met at Fine Arts Camp. And we played some D&D while at camp, too... it was the first time I gamed with anyone other than Aaron, John, Brian, Bryce, and Andrew. I even GM'd for that group... and there were arguments over how to play... settled by invocation of the magic "Rule Zero" and a vote for who got to GM.
Based upon what I've heard from folks from other places -
The US Military spread gaming far and wide... most bases wound up generating local groups off-base as well as on. This ups the frequency.
College towns tended to have lots more gamers.
Pacific-coast states/territories (CA, OR, WA BC, YT, AK, HI, Guam) seem to have been more gamers, including traditional board/card games, than Midwest or deep South. My cousins in Detroit seemed to have no clue about D&D in the early 90's... My hyper conservative cousin in Portland was all upset about how prolific "That satanic game" was in Portland around the same time.
I should add that I'm thankful for growing up in a place where gamers outnumbered police... (one gaming convention at UAA around 1989 had a group organizing a civic club off campus... they got 350 unique registrations at a time when APD had 350 officers.... and most of the people I gamed with weren't on the list!)
