Looking for Earliest Surviving RPG Recordings...

[PaulofCthulhu]

Hello, All,

As part of research into some planned roleplaying articles, I'm looking to find the earliest extant RPG recordings. For the past five years or so they've been appearing online, but I know that people have been taping games a lot longer than that.

If you have any info, or have an early recording yourself, do post here!

It will be interesting to see how far back they go...

Many thanks,

Paul

 

[w_earle_wheeler]

Good luck... I've been looking for the same thing. I was hoping against hope that someone had filmed early wargames or late 70s early 80s conventions and transferred them to a digital format... but no such luck yet.

 

[Henry]

The earliest I know of personally are some d6 WEG Star wars games from 1999 or 2000 that my group taped back then (on cassette tape on a player in the middle of the table, so pretty poor quality). Nothing earlier I've run into, though.

 

[PaulofCthulhu]

Quality not an issue! So, so far, d6 Star Wars by Henry, c. 2000 AD.

Anyone else?

Paul

 

[KingCrab]

My gaming group recorded tapes of our sessions back in 88 but the quality was low and I don't know which player has them now.

-Dave

 

[CountPopeula]

There were replays of Record of Lodoss War in Comptiq in 1986. I know that they were tape-recorded to be transcribed, but the original recording probably weren't kept after that. The system they used was D&D, for the record. Of course, even if you could manage to find the tapes, they'd be in Japanese.

But recording sessions seems to be really popular in Japan.

 

[PaulofCthulhu]

Language doesn't matter, either. Oldest knowledge (and preferable existence) of oldest recordings is what we're looking out for!

Cheers,

Paul

 

[Kwalish Kid]

Of course, the recordings mentioned are older than the D&D session recorded, in part, in the 1982 movie E.T. (Sure, a fictional source.)

I find it difficult to believe that nobody recorded a game session on their own before that. Someone must have a recorded session in their attic comewhere.

 

[sfgray]

In December of 1982, my just-finished-high-school gaming group made our one and only game session recording of an all-night AD&D marathon. The recording was a spur-of-the-moment happenstance; which is to say, the player whose house we were at had his portable cassette deck at hand, had a stack of already-well-used tapes he was going to throw out, and was bored. Against all odds, he hung onto those tapes all the long years since, finally pulling them out and digitally duping them last year (destroying two in the process of simply playing them; that's how brittle they were).

That 25-year-old audio was almost unintelligible, but when he passed the digital files on to me, i managed to clean them up enough to make them listenable. Doing so provided the expected heady mix of nostalgia and cringing, but most of all made me wish we'd recorded more.

 

[WizarDru]

I know my group recorded stuff during High School and then we did it once or twice with my college group, but I don't know if any of that stuff survives. Cassette tapes really weren't meant for that kind of long-term storage, regrettably. I do remember hearing some stuff from the high school group during my college years, but I'd have to see if anyone still has them.