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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5318829" data-attributes="member: 27780"><a href="http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xuqh8k_dragon-issue-200-novel-ideas_videogames#.UKaPkI6Rn8s" target="_blank">Novel Ideas</a>Novel ideas is a second column that ceases to be a regular going concern this issue. Not sure why, since if anything, the proportion of books they're publishing is still increasing. But despite not explicitly stating that, this still feels like a farewell of sorts, as it looks back over the early years of the book department. In it we discover exactly why our first two D&D books by messrs Norton and Holmes have been airbrushed from the company history. As they were released before the proper department was founded, quite possibly in conjunction with some other company, they aren't on the records in the same way. And we already know that their record-keeping in the early years of the company was a bit spotty. Its funny how the average gamer in the 90's, even those at the company itself, actually knew less about their 70's output than we do now. Anyway, it seems that their primary output in the early days wasn't novels, but interactive game books such as the Endless Quest line and all it's gimmicky spinoffs. Books aimed at younger readers, books aimed at girls, books aimed at transformers fans, <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> they spent a lot of effort trying to diversify the market. But they only really started having bestsellers when they tied things in with AD&D, the Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms settings in particular. Curiously, they devote little time to that era, assuming we already know about it. (and we do know rather more, since that was after they started running previews in the magazine on a regular basis. ) This is actually rather interesting, showing there was plenty of stuff TSR got up too in the early days that never even got mentioned in the magazine, due to choice or department co-ordination issues. Just the thing to make obsessive collectors gnash their teeth and have more things to hunt down. Still, it's not all nostalgia. Endless Quest is coming back! A whole new generation get to pick a path. Course, now they have to compete with computer games a lot more. Good luck capturing kid's imaginations the way they did at first.</blockquote>

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