Boot Hill, despite TSR pushing it pretty hard, never took off. Neither did competing products throughout the 1980s. It took adding fantasy and horror into Westerns in 1990s for games like Deadlands and the Wild West setting for Werewolf to succeed.
I ga e a hypothesis about Westerns. I learned from an interview I read with a BBC producer a while back that there is a temporal window most people have for period drama (unless it is something exceptional): anything setting more than ~60 years before present ceases to be generally relevant for audiences. The "Wild West" was well within that window in Golden Age Hollywood and early TV...and fell off a cliff in popularity starting about 6p years after the end of that era. By 1973, the Wild West was as foreign to audiences as Medieval France.
That doesn't explain why Medieval France (or England really) was still connecting with audiences and the Old West wasn't.
But D&D isn't an accurate Medieval period piece, it's a mish-mash. Westerns were always (somewhat) grounded period pieces when they were popular, even into the 60's Red Dead Redemption 1 would have been in living memory. When they moved out of that period piece window...they disappeared from pop culture rapidly, except for occasional and exceptional examples. In the 40's the average adult knew people who were alive in that period, and in Hollywood they actually could easily know people from that scene (hence the mythic status of the OK Corral shootout, after Wyatt Earp retired to LA and kept tdlling people about it). By 1973, the average person was far removed from the Wild West.
It wasn't historically accurate, of course, but it was a lot more grounded medieval at first blush* in the lates 70s and early 80s than today. Pictures of dudes in hauberks with helmets and swords and stuff.
My focus in College was Medieval Studies. That 70's-80's stuff abounded with anachronism, especially compared to the Western genre when it was popular.
I'm curious if there is a point at which it rebounds. Like "60-120 years ago is just not interesting, but 500-2000 years ago is."
Poaaibly: I think k the difference ia in a period piece with high fidelity detail (as an 80's kid, Stranger Things keeps giving me huge flashback emotions when I recognize gadgets and Tupperware my parents had, for instance), whereas most people for deep period pieces have a high tolerance for anachronism. Like I know a lot about the Middle Ages, bit I can't be bothered to worry about when a film mixes like 7 cultures and 12 time periods in one scene even when I know that is happening. If an iPhone showed up in Stranfer Things I would be annoyed.
That sounds like a theory built to fit a specific data set. Westerns are a period piece medium that dropped in popularity after the 1960s. (Although... Unforgiven, 1992. Wow.) The 'Wild West' era ended... late 1890s? Maybe 1900? So sort of fits that window. Any other 'temporal window' where the popularity of period drama fits within that 60 year time frame? Downton Abbey sure doesn't.
Downtown Abbey is the exception recently: there aren't many other interbellum period pieces anymore, because the BBC stopped making them in favor of post-war period pieces: aimilar to how occasianal Westerns like Silverado, Unforgiven, or 3:10 to Yuma come alonf after the gwnre collapsed. This nugget came from a BBC producer explaining why the Fayher Brown series was moved from the 20's to the 50's: to keep it within that window they have discovered through extensive research on how the British public responds to period pieces.
