aramis erak
Legend
You're severely misreading what I wrote.I mean, that might be so in Anchorage (presumably AK), but I suspect there might have been a lot of other factors in play there. Age particularly. That you're not even mentioning WW games in the mid-late '90s, that you have Torg of all things mentioned, really suggests to me that however that list was generated, it was basically a de facto relict population from the very early 1990s. Or something pretty weird was happening there.
I don't doubt AD&D was more widely played than sales reflected, but when you've got a situation where it's the late '90s and WW games are behind Torg? That's wacky.
You could from about 85 on, find a D&D group, even through the late 90's... In fact, at no point was it hard to find a D&D group in anchorage, not even the late 1990's, until I left in 2015.