D&D in the 80s, Fads, and the Satanic Panic

[Jer]

Those first couple of years in the 80s were when the sales numbers, as Snarf mentioned in the OP, shifted younger. Much more middle schoolers than before.

Makes you wonder maybe if some of the growth in sales was from moving the game to younger and younger buyers after each age group saturated.

 

[Reynard]

Makes you wonder maybe if some of the growth in sales was from moving the game to younger and younger buyers after each age group saturated.

I don't think there is much doubt that the main reason for the decline was market saturation. The satanic panic didn't help, but neither did Artari 2600.

 

[Cadence]

I'm just imagining how awful the Satanic Panic (or Comic Book panic in the 50s) would have been if social media had been around...

 

[Guest 7034872]

I'm just imagining how awful the Satanic Panic (or Comic Book panic in the 50s) would have been if social media had been around...

Incalculable.

 

[Cadence]

Which ones? The war games weren't board games, they were war games. Later I know they tried to ape Dungeon, but I don't know what market they aimed at.

The only Avalon Hill game that I remember anyone in the general public knowing about was Diplomacy. In the early 90s I knew folks who played Diplomacy who wouldn't have picked up another Avalon Hill game or played D&D.

The only Avalon Hill one I ever played was Titan, but I remember seeing them at the hobby stores.

I'm not sure where the line between war game and board game is (from Risk to Titan to Star Fleet Battles).

 

[Reynard]

I'm just imagining how awful the Satanic Panic (or Comic Book panic in the 50s) would have been if social media had been around...

cough**QAnon**cough

 

[Cadence]

cough**QAnon**cough

I've had something rolling around my head wondering how much the 1950s comic panic, 1980s satanic panic, and the modern things all fed off of the same personality traits and types of people.

 

[Reynard]

I've had something rolling around my head wondering how much the 1950s comic panic, 1980s satanic panic, and the modern things all fed off of the same personality traits and types of people.

Long before those things, and long after. Human nature is what it is and isn't likely to change any time soon.

 

[Mannahnin]

Were the Avalon Hill ones (and those of that style) aimed at older? Did the public at large have any consciousness of them?

They absolutely were aimed at an older audience, but they were a pretty small, hobby market. There are solid annual figures in Game Wizards comparing TSR's revenue to Avalon Hill and SPI and the general wargaming market each year, but I don't have my copy handy with me.

Greg Costikyan's famous 1996 elegy for SPI gives some numbers as well. The first commercial wargame (ignoring early outliers like HG Wells' Little Wars, I guess) he lists as 1953's Tactics, which sold 2000 copies and was the basis for Avalon' Hill's formation. The most successful war game of all time he lists as Avalon Hill's Squad Leader, with 200,000 copies sold.

SPI Died for Your Sins

In the mid-70s, SPI was grossing $2 million annually, and employing as many as forty people. It was publishing forty or more games every year. As it appeared at the time, SPI, and wargaming as a whole, was on an upward trend.

The mid and late 70s were the heyday of the field. New companies sprang up every year: Rand Games Associates, Simulation Design Corps, Panzerfaust, Conflict Games, Operational Studies Group, Yaquinto, Worldwide Wargames (3W), Simulations Canada.... The most successful and enduring was Game Designers Workshop, founded by a group of game enthusiasts who met at the University of Illinois's Champaign campus. From the very first, GDW's games were innovative, well-designed and of the highest quality. They tended, however, to deal with more obscure topics than SPI's, and often had fairly opaque rules; in general, GDW appealed more to the hardcore hobbyist.

At the time, sales were increasing everywhere; Avalon Hill sold more than 200,000 copies of John Hill's SQUAD LEADER, the best-selling wargame of all time. And game designers, beginning to believe that their vocation could become a permanent occupation, a developing art form, an industry capable of supporting its artists in at least modest comfort, banded together to form the Game Designers' Guild. Wargaming, everyone seemed to believe, had achieved a permanent presence in American life, if a tiny one by comparison to fields like film or publishing.

That, alas, was the high water mark.

From 1977 onward, SPI's sales declined, mainly because of mismanagement. The dollar volume remained nearly constant; even in 1981, SPI (not publicly traded) was claiming an annual $2 million in sales, the same figure it had reported as early as 1975. But these were, of course, the years of double-digit inflation, so that SPI's income, in real terms, was declining year by year. In 1980, an internal struggle began at SPI, as many staff members strove to replace Jim Dunnigan as the company's manager. The name of Dunnigan had been virtually synonymous with SPI since its foundation; his personality, vigor, and intelligence had made it a success. Yet, like many entrepreneurs, he proved incapable of managing it as an ongoing business.

Which ones? The war games weren't board games, they were war games. Later I know they tried to ape Dungeon, but I don't know what market they aimed at.

I think you've got wires crossed a bit. Most war games back in the day, like Avalon Hill and SPI's bread and butter publications, were board wargames. "Hex and chit", commonly. Using printed game boards with counters for units that you moved around the board.

Wargames using miniatures were a sub-set of the larger wargaming hobby, but more expensive and space intensive. A game of Squad Leader might take hours but could be tucked away in a neat box and put back in a convenient spot on a regular book case afterward. Avalon Hill had a whole line of boxed games for years they specifically titled "Bookcase games" (Outdoor Survival is one of them, as is my copy of their Starship Troopers game), which had a standard box size meant to have a similar footprint as a large encyclopedia or dictionary volume. Very different from the common long rectangle I always remember mass-market boardgames for kids coming in when I was growing up, and is still widely used (for Monopoly, e.g.) by the big boardgame companies like Parker Brothers and Milton Bradley.

Side note- Dungeon! was originally sold in a smaller box, with a folding vinyl map. My first copy, OTOH, "The New Dungeon!" was the 1989 edition, which made the board bigger and fit it into the familiar larger rectangle shape/footprint of a mass-market boardgame for kids.

There's a significant incident talked about in Game Wizards about Fantasy Forest, TSR's 1980 attempt at a mass market boardgame for kids, and the hundreds of thousands of dollars they lost due to the singular incompetence of a Blume in-law who was then head of Purchasing, who managed to buy boxes and boards for the game which were completely incompatible in size!

A miniatures collection, on the other hand, at least takes boxes, and many of us collectors have extensive display shelves, and boxes and boxes of our unpainted stuff. Chainmail was a miniatures game, and the major wargame publishers initially saw this "fantasy gaming" fad as part of that sub-set.

 

[Reynard]

I think you've got wires crossed a bit. Most war games back in the day, like Avalon Hill and SPI's bread and butter publications, were board wargames. "Hex and chit", commonly. Using printed game boards with counters for units that you moved around the board.

Wargames using miniatures were a sub-set of the larger wargaming hobby, but more expensive and space intensive. A game of Squad Leader might take hours but could be tucked away in a neat box and put back in a convenient spot on a regular book case afterward. Avalon Hill had a whole line of boxed games for years they specifically titled "Bookcase games" (Outdoor Survival is one of them, as is my copy of their Starship Troopers game), which had a standard box size meant to have a similar footprint as a large encyclopedia or dictionary volume. Very different from the common long rectangle I always remember mass-market boardgames for kids coming in when I was growing up, and is still widely used (for Monopoly, e.g.) by the big mass market boardgame companies.
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A miniatures collection, on the other hand, at least takes boxes, and many of us collectors have extensive display shelves, and boxes and boxes of our unpainted stuff. Chainmail was a miniatures game, and the major wargame publishers initially saw this "fantasy gaming" fad as part of that sub-set.

Oh, I know, but being a "board wargame" was not being a "board game" and I imagine you would get some angry stares walking into a board game event and asking them how they liked their board games.