Basic D&D Was Selling 600,000+/Year At One Point

Recently Ben Riggs shared some sales figures of AD&D 1st Edition. Now he has shared figures for Basic D&D from 1979-1995, and during the early 80s is was selling 500-700K copies per year. Ben Riggs' book, Slaying the Dragon, which is a history of TSR-era D&D, comes out soon, and you can pre-order your copy now. https://read.macmillan.com/lp/slaying-the-dragon/ You can compare these...

Recently Ben Riggs shared some sales figures of AD&D 1st Edition. Now he has shared figures for Basic D&D from 1979-1995, and during the early 80s is was selling 500-700K copies per year.

Ben Riggs' book, Slaying the Dragon, which is a history of TSR-era D&D, comes out soon, and you can pre-order your copy now.


bdndyr.jpg


You can compare these figures to those of AD&D 1E in the same period. Basic D&D sold higher than AD&D's PHB and DMG combined for 4 years running, again in the early 80s.

anbd.jpg


If you take a look at the overall sales from 1979-1995, here are the two beside each other (again, this is just PHB and DMG, so it doesn't include the Monster Manual, Unearthed Arcana, etc.)

combo.jpg


More actual D&D sales numbers!

Below you will find the sales numbers of Basic D&D, and then two charts comparing those to the sales of AD&D 1st edition. For those who don’t know, early in its life, the tree of D&D was split in half. On the one side there was D&D, an RPG designed to bring beginners into the game. It was simpler, and didn’t try to have rules for everything.
On the other side there was Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Gary Gygax’s attempt to throw a net around the world and then shove it into rulebooks. The game was so detailed that it provided rules on how Armor Class changed depending on what hand your PC held their shield in. (It may also have been an attempt to cut D&D co-creator Dave Arneson out of royalties…)

I am frankly shocked at how well Basic D&D sold. Having discovered AD&D 2nd edition in the 90s, I thought of “Dungeons & Dragons” as a sort of baby game of mashed peas and steamed potatoes. It was for people not ready for the full meal that was AD&D. (I have since learned how wrong I was to dismiss the beauty of what Holmes, Moldvay, Mentzer, Cook, et al created for us in those wondrous BECMI boxed sets…)

I figured that Basic D&D was just a series of intro products, but over its lifetime, it actually outsold AD&D 1st edition. (Partly because 1st edition was replaced by 2nd edition in 1989. I’ll start rolling out the 2nd ed numbers tomorrow FYI.) These numbers would explain why in a 1980 Dragon article Gygax spoke of AD&D not being “abandoned.”
Still, between 1980 and 1984, Basic outsold AD&D. The strong numbers for Basic D&D prompt a few questions. Where was the strength of the brand? Were these two lines of products in competition with each other? Was one “real” D&D? And why did TSR stop supporting Basic D&D in the 90s?

The only one of those questions I will hazard is the last one. A source told me that because TSR CEO Lorraine Williams did not want to generate royalties for Gary Gygax or Dave Arneson, Basic D&D was left to wither on the vine.

I will also say this: TSR will die in 1997 of a thousand cuts, but the one underlying all of them was a failure of the company to grow its customer base. TSR wanted its D&D players to migrate over to AD&D, but what if they didn’t? What if they wanted to keep playing D&D, and TSR simply stopped making the product they wanted to buy? What if TSR walked away from what may have been hundreds of thousands of customers because of a sort of personal vendetta?

Tomorrow, I’ll post numbers for 2nd edition AD&D, and comparisons for it with Basic and 1st edition.

And if you don’t know, I have a book of D&D history coming out in a couple weeks. If you find me interesting, you can preorder in the first comment below!

Also, I'll post raw sales numbers below for the interested.
 

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The Scythian

Explorer
I know that the Toys R Us closest to me carried BECMI D&D all the way through to the Immortals set and AD&D through to the late 1980s or early 1990s, when they were unloading some of the later 1st edition AD&D hardcovers at bargain basement discounts. Although I didn't have occasion to visit Toys R Us much after that, I know that they carried the early '90s rerelease of the board game Dungeon and the version of Basic that was released around that same time.

I know that D&D (Rules Cyclopedia era) and AD&D (especially 2nd edition) were available at every chain bookstore in my area throughout the 1990s.
 

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Mannahnin

Scion of Murgen (He/Him)
I'm flipping through online archived Christmas catalogues from the major department stores right now.

I see that the 1983 Sears wishbook has D&D and Star Frontiers, and 1984 has a full page of D&D and AD&D, including the revised art hardcovers, a few Grenadier Dragon Lords minis and a gift set of 4 Endless Quest books, but no sign of D&D in the 1985 catalogue.

1984 JC Penneys also no sign. 1982 JC Penneys has the D&D electronic game, but I'm not finding D&D itself. 1983 the closest thing is Crossbows & Catapults. ;)

1984 Montgomery Ward no sign. 1981 Montgomery Ward has the D&D "computer labyrinth" game (along with Dark Tower and a couple of similar games, and funnily enough a Ouija board on the same page), but no actual D&D.
 
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Snarf Zagyg

Notorious Liquefactionist
Supporter
I'm flipping through online archived Christmas catalogues from the major department stores right now.

I see that the 1983 Sears wishbook has D&D and Star Frontiers, and 1984 has a full page of D&D and AD&D, including the revised art hardcovers, a few Grenadier Dragon Lords minis and a gift set of 4 Endless Quest books, but no sign of D&D in the 1985 catalogue.

1984 JC Penneys also no sign. 1982 JC Penneys has the D&D electronic game, but I'm not finding D&D itself. 1983 the closest thing is Crossbows & Catapults. ;)

1984 Montgomery Ward no sign. 1981 Montgomery Ward has the D&D "computer labyrinth" game (along with Dark Tower and a couple of similar games, and funnily enough a Ouija board on the same page), but no actual D&D.

So a quick note on that-

the Sears catalog was, going into the late 70s and early 80s, still a big deal.

But the presence of D&D in the 84 Wishbook meant that it would have captured the '84 sales. More importantly, the 80s saw a massive spread in the mall (both "regular" and "strip") as well as the Big Box stars (Toys R Us) that became the primary focus of D&D sales outside of hobbyist shops.

That's why it's complicated; this is before even getting into distribution through ... scholastic book sales (yes, D&D was distributed in the 1980s through school-sponsored book sales).
 

Reynard

Legend
Supporter
That's why it's complicated; this is before even getting into distribution through ... scholastic book sales (yes, D&D was distributed in the 1980s through school-sponsored book sales).
Then, as now, the extremists targeted school boards as the front line in their culture war, and many acquiesced not because they agreed but because they did not want to deal with the crazies over such a small issue. So many schools lost their D&D clubs.
 

The Glen

Legend
One reason behind the high sales of the BECMI sets and related products were they were translated is far more languages than AD&D products. I believe it was 17 different languages compared to about half that for 1st edition. The Japanese basic set with its manga-style presentation was a notable standout. There's a reason why Mystara is far better known in Europe and Asia compared to the Forgotten Realms or Greyhawk. If you wanted to buy a Hebrew D&D game world your options were Karameikos or Karameikos. Mentzer talked about it in an interview years ago.
 

The Glen

Legend
To be fair, the Goodman Games treatment of these products is top-notch. I'm slowly collecting them all, and I'm amazed at the level of care and detail they put into each one. I don't know if WotC could do a better job of it.
Except that fold-out map in Castle Amber. That was rather oddly placed.
 

Mannahnin

Scion of Murgen (He/Him)
One reason behind the high sales of the BECMI sets and related products were they were translated is far more languages than AD&D products. I believe it was 17 different languages compared to about half that for 1st edition. The Japanese basic set with its manga-style presentation was a notable standout. There's a reason why Mystara is far better known in Europe and Asia compared to the Forgotten Realms or Greyhawk. If you wanted to buy a Hebrew D&D game world your options were Karameikos or Karameikos. Mentzer talked about it in an interview years ago.
Those sales aren't actually included in the OP. Someone asked on Ben's FB post, and he confirmed these are just showing North American sales.
 

CleverNickName

Limit Break Dancing (He/They)
BADD was formed in 1983, after Pat Pulling's wrongful death lawsuits against her son's Irving's high school principal and against TSR had been dismissed.
BADD got a huge boost in 1986-1987, too, thanks to the antics of Sean Sellers' defense attorney, who coached him to claim "the Dungeons and Dragons made me do it" as a murder defense. It was all the news could talk about in Oklahoma.
 


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