TODAY IS A GOOD DAY TO DIE! Heghlu'meH QaQ jajvam!
Wait, no, that's not it. ....Today is a good day to revisit an old topic, because I have slightly changed my opinion! Three years ago, I used the sales figures recently unearthed by Ben Riggs and the background in Jon Peterson's book Game Wizards to talk about the Satanic Panic... both to discuss a little history, and also to discuss my opinion about what the history actually meant. Spoiler- the general gist was that (to paraphrase Seinfeld) the Satanic Panic was real, and it was, um, spectacular, but it did not cause the initial crash of D&D's "golden age" that ended in 1983, and definitely sputtered out in 1984.
Several years of reflection, however, have brought me to the Kardashian-like position that ... well, there is a BIG BUT to what I wrote. Now, I know that the general gestalt of our time is to never admit error and to double down on your wrongness (I'm not wrong, the WORLD IS WRONG AND YOUR WRONGER FOR ACCEPTING THAT STUPID REALITY!), so I want to make sure that y'all know that everything I wrote back then was 100% correct. It's just ... well, I wanted to revisit the thoughts to add a little more emphasis on the nuance of what I was trying to convey. So here is attempt two!
What is the TLDR of this? 1. Providing a little history D&D (all Snarf Essays are 85% history, 39% Bard Antipathy, 43.3% obscure and dated references, and 103% accurate math). 2. Showing that the "Satanic Panic" didn't cause the crash of D&D- in fact, the initial attempt to unfairly link D&D with Satanism was actually rocket fuel to the sales. 3. Revisiting my Satanic Panic analysis because while it didn't crash D&D, it was a very real and terrible moral panic that had a deleterious impact from the mid-80s on that lingered for some time- like the rank stench from my basement where I completely do not have an increasing number of dead bards.
If you look at the sales charts that Ben Riggs dug up, you can see that there is a massive dropoff in the sales of both AD&D (the PHB+DMG) and Basic D&D from 1983 to 1984, with a continuing decline until the numbers go to zero around the release of 2e (with a brief spike for Basic in 1991 due to the release of the Black Box and RC). Now, when most people see this, they make an assumption ... well, this was the Satanic Panic, right? It had to be! Massive loss of sales from 1983 to 1984, and continuing decline after that.
The short, and unsatisfying answer is ... no. It wasn't the Satanic Panic. To understand why, we have to do a slightly deeper dive into what, exactly, the Satanic Panic was in terms of D&D, how it affected D&D's sales, how the Satanic Panic was just part of the larger moral panics of the 80s, and why the sales figures for '83-'84 are not surprising at all- and what the timelines actually mean.
Here's a few charts to help you visualize what I will be discussing- there's more (collected, h/t @Alzrius , at the link above) if you want to look!
1. Why the Satanic Panic Was Instrumental to D&D's Success.
I mocked him for knowing ALL UR BASES R BELONG TO US, but not knowing the date of the Smoot-Hawley tariffs. Which made me feel superior, because he didn't realize I didn't know the date either.
Originally, TSR was set up to just publish various rules for the wargaming market. But as people began to play D&D and began to see how it was played (remember, the OD&D rules were notoriously opaque and were hard to just learn by reading) it slowly caught on. TSR became a giant ... but in a small-sized pool. The peers (and targets) for TSR were companies like Avalon Hill. The entire market ... was a tiny hobbyist market; the entire market for war-games and associated games in 1974 was less than TSR's revenue in 1980.
Still, TSR was doing well by the end of 1978! The had become a major player, and were well-known in the industry, and were even instigating the (kind of hilarious) feuds over Origins and GenCon. D&D was their big product, and it was primarily an older market - adults and college kids, science fiction fans and people in the wargaming hobby. At the end of 1978, they had more than 15 employees, revenue just over $900k and ... wait for it .... turned a cool $58,000 in profit. WOOT! And then came the Egbert incident. In August of 1979, James Dallas Egbert III disappeared from his dorm room. The whole story is ... sad. But for purposes of D&D, this was the beginning of the Satanic Panic. An investigator hired by Egbert's family (William Dear) went on a media crusade and claimed that Egbert was "live-playing" D&D in the steam tunnels, and that Egbert has lost touch with reality ... and also kept hammering the "Satanic" undertones of D&D. This became the basis for the later book and movie, Mazes and Monsters.
The one thing to know is that Tom Hanks has a lot o' 'splainin' to do, and I'm not talking about Bosom Bodies. The two things to know about this is that (1) William Dear was full of it ... none of what he was talking about was true; and (2) this catapulted D&D into national consciousness. As detailed in Game Wizards, suddenly people around the country were calling in to stores and asking if they had this "D&D" product. The recently written "Basic" (by Dr. Holmes) was a hot seller, as was the DMG and PHB. The Satanic Panic was rocket fuel to D&D. In addition, it also had the somewhat ... interesting ... effect of contributing to lowering of the age of the consumer demographic for D&D. Previously, D&D was primarily selling to college-age and older individuals; now, D&D was primarily selling to high school and middle school kids.
(Aside, I am simplifying a few things- TSR also worked hard to expand their market by selling through Sears, JC Penney, regular booksellers, and at Scholastic book fairs)
This massive explosion is seen in Riggs' charts- in 1979, they were having trouble keeping up with the year-end demand (the incident played out over the fall), and then as they ramped up production, you see the 1980 explosion. This period ('79-'83) is often thought of as a golden time for D&D, because of the sheer number of publications, modules, and output. And the sales of the core books match it.
At the most basic level then, D&D as a mass-market phenomenon would not have existed but for the initial panic. The golden age of D&D from 1979 - 1984 was a boom - a quintessential '80s fad that was kicked off by the Egbert incident. The media's uncritical reporting on BS "satanic" claims by William Dear in 1979 led to an explosion of popularity! So ... we've learned a valuable lesson, right? Nothing bad can possibly happen with lots of people believing lies!
2. Pulling, BADD, and the Continuing Waves of the 80s
As long as I read the news, line by line and minute by minute, I had some say in what happened, don't I? I have to have some say in what happened, even if it was only WHAT?
Now, I know what most of you are saying. But Snarf! I watched Stranger Things! And that told me that, like, the Satanic Panic was bad or something. Um, I might need to rewatch it, but I'm pretty sure that the Hellfire Club had to kill the Satanic Panic in the Down Under with an Awesome Blossom. And I get it - that's not totally wrong. The Satanic Panic with D&D wasn't just the single Egnert incident. While there were other incidents (detailed in Game Wizards, and leading to TSR having a rapid response team) the primary one that began to become an issue for D&D was the death of Irving Lee Pulling in 1982; his mother, Patricia Pulling, blamed D&D for his death. She sued a school principal and TSR- all cases were dismissed. Then, in 1983, she formed BADD (ugh ... Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons). There were innumerable media appearances and hearings, and this became a real issue for Christians. How much of an issue? Well, Jack Chick got in on the action with an anti-D&D tract, Dark Dungeons. Get out of here, you don't exist anymore!
Which ... what? Okay, backing up a bit, this is the part that doesn't get as much coverage about the 80s. The Satanic Panic? It was a real thing, not just an exaggerated plot point in Stranger Things. Footloose? That movie was based on actual events- there were places at the time that still had dancing bans. And people really, truly believed that there was a giant mass of Satan worshippers out there, killing people, doing ritual abuse in the name of Satan, engaged in child sacrifice. And people were ... jailed. Lost their jobs. Courts admitted evidence of so-called "Satanism" against people, and lots of lives were damaged and destroyed by a pervasive belief that America was just chock full of giant bands of hidden Satanists, doin' the murder and the child sacrifice all over.
I know .. crazy, right? Only in the 80s could some sort of bizarre and baseless conspiracy theory spread like wildfire that accused innocent people of ritual child torture and trafficking and murder. ....Wait... what? Oh ... never mind.
But this was a very real thing. There were experts that testified at trials about the "Satanic cults" responsible. Child protection agencies had to have training on Satanic ritualized abuse. The 80s weren't all trapper keepers and day-glow colors.
And it wasn't just D&D! Companies like Proctor & Gamble had to battle this as well because of their logo- with Church groups claiming that the executives were in league with Satan. Constant rumors circulated about every single rock group - and, of course, the implicit Satanic messages from playing the records backwards. Anything that was out of the mainstream, even a little, was in danger of being tarred by the moral panic. It's crazy in retrospect ... but it's there. I think it's important to acknowledge this, because our hobby rightfully focuses on the Satanic Panic because it was a watershed moment in many ways for D&D- but it was a moral panic that had an outsized impact and did a lot of real damage and hurt people far more than just complaining about renaming devils and demons in 2e.
3. Did the Satanic Panic Cause D&D's Crash?
I tried to get my parents to be more hip and use emojis; I regretted my decision as soon as they texted me that we were having eggplant parmesan and peach pie for dinner. At least, I hope that was what they texted me.
In a word ... no. The Satanic Panic clearly affected D&D. But it wasn't the cause of the crash. To understand why, it helps to first understand the ways in which the Satanic Panic affected D&D. First, it should be acknowledged that, despite the bravado espoused by Gygax and others, TSR was concerned about the moral panic. There is evidence of this long before the 2e transition. For example-
1. By 1982, TSR already had a one-page Code of Ethics that required, inter alia, that good always triumph, ridicule of religion is not permitted, and evil will neve be presented in glamorous or alluring circumstances.
3. As recounted in Game Wizards, TSR was already reacting to, and softening, its material due to these pressures in the early 80s.
4. As recounted in seen in Art & Arcana, TSR moved away from the edgier art of the '70s to the more ... Elmore art starting in 1982. By the way- this isn't a value judgment, as a lot of that art is beautiful! But there was certainly an emphasis on depicting things that were acceptable for the Reagan 1980s- which I will leave undefined since it will just lead to needless argument.
All of which is to say that TSR did make public statements about the moral panic, but also knew that its primary consumers were middle school and high school students, and were internally changing their products (and had a code by 1982) for that reason. No, it didn't touch the legacy material, like the PHB and DMG (except Deities & Demigods), but it certainly affected the material produced in the 1980s.
But all of this is missing a very salient point about the specific timing. For this, we are going to briefly discuss E.T.- a movie shot in 1981 and released in 1982. In E.T., do you remember who is playing D&D (albeit not called that because Spielberg couldn't get TSR to agree to it)? That's right- the cool older brother and his cool friends. In the very early 80s, D&D was ... cool. It was a fad, like a lot of things that swept through the 80s. Like parachute pants. Or a cabbage patch doll. Amazingly, in 1984 TSR was worried by the rise of a new fad that was eating their lunch ... TRIVIAL PURSUIT.
D&D was also ubiquitous. You could get D&D from a Sears catalog. Or from B. Dalton. Or from Kaybee toys. Or from any one of a number of sources.
Finally, the books lasted forever. The original PHB, DMG, and MM ... were well made. A lot of us still have copies of our originals. And unlike the phenomenon we've see with 5e, people weren't buying multiple copies of the books in a group.
Which brings us back to the charts- looking just at 1980 - 1983, we can see that almost 2 million core books (PHB+DMG) were sold. Two. Million. Books. Contrasting this with the revenue numbers from Game Wizards, we see that revenues didn't plummet in 1984. TSR was still selling a lot of stuff. Just not the core rule books. Which makes perfect sense! The market was saturated, and the fad period was ending. The people that wanted the rules books to play had already bought them in the prior four years. But the fad was over- there wasn't massive numbers of new people starting to play; it had gone from a broadly-popular fad "that everyone is doing" to a niche game. And the sales figures show that the last fad year was 1983. The collapse had already started by 1984.
And this matters, because all of those famous incidents? The 60 Minutes Special with Pulling and Gygax? That was 1985. The Jack Chick tract? Made in 1984, first widely available in 1985. The issue is that the timing just doesn't work; D&D was facing some pushback here and there in the early 80s, but the sustained issues didn't start until 1985.
Did the Satanic Panic hurt actual people? Definitely.
Did it affect sales? Sure, at the margins there were people that would have played, but could not because of their families/church groups/etc. Arguably, that may have been counterbalanced by the people that played because they heard of it through the free media.
But was the Satanic Panic responsible for the collapse in sales in 1984? No- the timing doesn't match up.
4. What Did the Satanic Panic Do to D&D?
I was incandescently indignant that anyone would use the combination microphone / camera / tracking device I carried with me everywhere to snoop on me.
The Satanic Panic had a massive impact despite not causing the 1984 crash, and I hope that people use the comments (if they chose to) to tell any stories that they might have. Schools that used to have after-school D&D groups were forced to cancel those activities. Parents would not let their teens play (and many people had to hide the fact that they played). There's a lot of sad, and unnecessary, stories, about how the moral panic affected D&D players.
But I want to address (briefly!) two other issues that rarely get talked about. The first is the one I mentioned above- because of the changing customer demographics, and because of the rising moral panic, TSR began changing its products. The 1982 Code of Ethics, the change in art direction, even the later change from Deities & Demigods to Legends and Lore. TSR was self-censoring, and I would argue that the change in direction is noticeable.
The second ... well, look at those graphs again (or look at all the others collected or the financial numbers). Here's the thing- 1984 was the crash. But 1985 stabilized at a lower level, and then there's another drop. We often misremember decades- but the Satanic Panic wasn't ... "the 1980s". It was something that really began to gain steam in the mid-80s and didn't really exhaust itself until '93 for '95. The Satanic Panic acted, IMO, as an anchor on TSR's RPG sales in the late '80s, which in turn was the impetus for many of the design choices made in ... 2e.
Zeb Cook is probably the most underrated and under-appreciated designer of the TSR era. IMO. With that in mind, it is obvious that the 2e core books were designed around the Satanic Panic.
So after a few years of thought, I realized that while I was one-hundred and crazy percent right (as I always am) when I first looked at the issue, I was remiss in not looking at the larger impact- both the subtle ways TSR was self-censoring prior, and to the way that the continued drag on sales after the crash would have such a profound impact on the initial ruleset of 2e.
Wait, no, that's not it. ....Today is a good day to revisit an old topic, because I have slightly changed my opinion! Three years ago, I used the sales figures recently unearthed by Ben Riggs and the background in Jon Peterson's book Game Wizards to talk about the Satanic Panic... both to discuss a little history, and also to discuss my opinion about what the history actually meant. Spoiler- the general gist was that (to paraphrase Seinfeld) the Satanic Panic was real, and it was, um, spectacular, but it did not cause the initial crash of D&D's "golden age" that ended in 1983, and definitely sputtered out in 1984.
Several years of reflection, however, have brought me to the Kardashian-like position that ... well, there is a BIG BUT to what I wrote. Now, I know that the general gestalt of our time is to never admit error and to double down on your wrongness (I'm not wrong, the WORLD IS WRONG AND YOUR WRONGER FOR ACCEPTING THAT STUPID REALITY!), so I want to make sure that y'all know that everything I wrote back then was 100% correct. It's just ... well, I wanted to revisit the thoughts to add a little more emphasis on the nuance of what I was trying to convey. So here is attempt two!
What is the TLDR of this? 1. Providing a little history D&D (all Snarf Essays are 85% history, 39% Bard Antipathy, 43.3% obscure and dated references, and 103% accurate math). 2. Showing that the "Satanic Panic" didn't cause the crash of D&D- in fact, the initial attempt to unfairly link D&D with Satanism was actually rocket fuel to the sales. 3. Revisiting my Satanic Panic analysis because while it didn't crash D&D, it was a very real and terrible moral panic that had a deleterious impact from the mid-80s on that lingered for some time- like the rank stench from my basement where I completely do not have an increasing number of dead bards.
If you look at the sales charts that Ben Riggs dug up, you can see that there is a massive dropoff in the sales of both AD&D (the PHB+DMG) and Basic D&D from 1983 to 1984, with a continuing decline until the numbers go to zero around the release of 2e (with a brief spike for Basic in 1991 due to the release of the Black Box and RC). Now, when most people see this, they make an assumption ... well, this was the Satanic Panic, right? It had to be! Massive loss of sales from 1983 to 1984, and continuing decline after that.
The short, and unsatisfying answer is ... no. It wasn't the Satanic Panic. To understand why, we have to do a slightly deeper dive into what, exactly, the Satanic Panic was in terms of D&D, how it affected D&D's sales, how the Satanic Panic was just part of the larger moral panics of the 80s, and why the sales figures for '83-'84 are not surprising at all- and what the timelines actually mean.
Here's a few charts to help you visualize what I will be discussing- there's more (collected, h/t @Alzrius , at the link above) if you want to look!
1. Why the Satanic Panic Was Instrumental to D&D's Success.
I mocked him for knowing ALL UR BASES R BELONG TO US, but not knowing the date of the Smoot-Hawley tariffs. Which made me feel superior, because he didn't realize I didn't know the date either.
Originally, TSR was set up to just publish various rules for the wargaming market. But as people began to play D&D and began to see how it was played (remember, the OD&D rules were notoriously opaque and were hard to just learn by reading) it slowly caught on. TSR became a giant ... but in a small-sized pool. The peers (and targets) for TSR were companies like Avalon Hill. The entire market ... was a tiny hobbyist market; the entire market for war-games and associated games in 1974 was less than TSR's revenue in 1980.
Still, TSR was doing well by the end of 1978! The had become a major player, and were well-known in the industry, and were even instigating the (kind of hilarious) feuds over Origins and GenCon. D&D was their big product, and it was primarily an older market - adults and college kids, science fiction fans and people in the wargaming hobby. At the end of 1978, they had more than 15 employees, revenue just over $900k and ... wait for it .... turned a cool $58,000 in profit. WOOT! And then came the Egbert incident. In August of 1979, James Dallas Egbert III disappeared from his dorm room. The whole story is ... sad. But for purposes of D&D, this was the beginning of the Satanic Panic. An investigator hired by Egbert's family (William Dear) went on a media crusade and claimed that Egbert was "live-playing" D&D in the steam tunnels, and that Egbert has lost touch with reality ... and also kept hammering the "Satanic" undertones of D&D. This became the basis for the later book and movie, Mazes and Monsters.
(Aside, I am simplifying a few things- TSR also worked hard to expand their market by selling through Sears, JC Penney, regular booksellers, and at Scholastic book fairs)
This massive explosion is seen in Riggs' charts- in 1979, they were having trouble keeping up with the year-end demand (the incident played out over the fall), and then as they ramped up production, you see the 1980 explosion. This period ('79-'83) is often thought of as a golden time for D&D, because of the sheer number of publications, modules, and output. And the sales of the core books match it.
At the most basic level then, D&D as a mass-market phenomenon would not have existed but for the initial panic. The golden age of D&D from 1979 - 1984 was a boom - a quintessential '80s fad that was kicked off by the Egbert incident. The media's uncritical reporting on BS "satanic" claims by William Dear in 1979 led to an explosion of popularity! So ... we've learned a valuable lesson, right? Nothing bad can possibly happen with lots of people believing lies!
2. Pulling, BADD, and the Continuing Waves of the 80s
As long as I read the news, line by line and minute by minute, I had some say in what happened, don't I? I have to have some say in what happened, even if it was only WHAT?
Now, I know what most of you are saying. But Snarf! I watched Stranger Things! And that told me that, like, the Satanic Panic was bad or something. Um, I might need to rewatch it, but I'm pretty sure that the Hellfire Club had to kill the Satanic Panic in the Down Under with an Awesome Blossom. And I get it - that's not totally wrong. The Satanic Panic with D&D wasn't just the single Egnert incident. While there were other incidents (detailed in Game Wizards, and leading to TSR having a rapid response team) the primary one that began to become an issue for D&D was the death of Irving Lee Pulling in 1982; his mother, Patricia Pulling, blamed D&D for his death. She sued a school principal and TSR- all cases were dismissed. Then, in 1983, she formed BADD (ugh ... Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons). There were innumerable media appearances and hearings, and this became a real issue for Christians. How much of an issue? Well, Jack Chick got in on the action with an anti-D&D tract, Dark Dungeons. Get out of here, you don't exist anymore!
Which ... what? Okay, backing up a bit, this is the part that doesn't get as much coverage about the 80s. The Satanic Panic? It was a real thing, not just an exaggerated plot point in Stranger Things. Footloose? That movie was based on actual events- there were places at the time that still had dancing bans. And people really, truly believed that there was a giant mass of Satan worshippers out there, killing people, doing ritual abuse in the name of Satan, engaged in child sacrifice. And people were ... jailed. Lost their jobs. Courts admitted evidence of so-called "Satanism" against people, and lots of lives were damaged and destroyed by a pervasive belief that America was just chock full of giant bands of hidden Satanists, doin' the murder and the child sacrifice all over.
I know .. crazy, right? Only in the 80s could some sort of bizarre and baseless conspiracy theory spread like wildfire that accused innocent people of ritual child torture and trafficking and murder. ....Wait... what? Oh ... never mind.
But this was a very real thing. There were experts that testified at trials about the "Satanic cults" responsible. Child protection agencies had to have training on Satanic ritualized abuse. The 80s weren't all trapper keepers and day-glow colors.
And it wasn't just D&D! Companies like Proctor & Gamble had to battle this as well because of their logo- with Church groups claiming that the executives were in league with Satan. Constant rumors circulated about every single rock group - and, of course, the implicit Satanic messages from playing the records backwards. Anything that was out of the mainstream, even a little, was in danger of being tarred by the moral panic. It's crazy in retrospect ... but it's there. I think it's important to acknowledge this, because our hobby rightfully focuses on the Satanic Panic because it was a watershed moment in many ways for D&D- but it was a moral panic that had an outsized impact and did a lot of real damage and hurt people far more than just complaining about renaming devils and demons in 2e.
3. Did the Satanic Panic Cause D&D's Crash?
I tried to get my parents to be more hip and use emojis; I regretted my decision as soon as they texted me that we were having eggplant parmesan and peach pie for dinner. At least, I hope that was what they texted me.
In a word ... no. The Satanic Panic clearly affected D&D. But it wasn't the cause of the crash. To understand why, it helps to first understand the ways in which the Satanic Panic affected D&D. First, it should be acknowledged that, despite the bravado espoused by Gygax and others, TSR was concerned about the moral panic. There is evidence of this long before the 2e transition. For example-
1. By 1982, TSR already had a one-page Code of Ethics that required, inter alia, that good always triumph, ridicule of religion is not permitted, and evil will neve be presented in glamorous or alluring circumstances.
3. As recounted in Game Wizards, TSR was already reacting to, and softening, its material due to these pressures in the early 80s.
4. As recounted in seen in Art & Arcana, TSR moved away from the edgier art of the '70s to the more ... Elmore art starting in 1982. By the way- this isn't a value judgment, as a lot of that art is beautiful! But there was certainly an emphasis on depicting things that were acceptable for the Reagan 1980s- which I will leave undefined since it will just lead to needless argument.
All of which is to say that TSR did make public statements about the moral panic, but also knew that its primary consumers were middle school and high school students, and were internally changing their products (and had a code by 1982) for that reason. No, it didn't touch the legacy material, like the PHB and DMG (except Deities & Demigods), but it certainly affected the material produced in the 1980s.
But all of this is missing a very salient point about the specific timing. For this, we are going to briefly discuss E.T.- a movie shot in 1981 and released in 1982. In E.T., do you remember who is playing D&D (albeit not called that because Spielberg couldn't get TSR to agree to it)? That's right- the cool older brother and his cool friends. In the very early 80s, D&D was ... cool. It was a fad, like a lot of things that swept through the 80s. Like parachute pants. Or a cabbage patch doll. Amazingly, in 1984 TSR was worried by the rise of a new fad that was eating their lunch ... TRIVIAL PURSUIT.
D&D was also ubiquitous. You could get D&D from a Sears catalog. Or from B. Dalton. Or from Kaybee toys. Or from any one of a number of sources.
Finally, the books lasted forever. The original PHB, DMG, and MM ... were well made. A lot of us still have copies of our originals. And unlike the phenomenon we've see with 5e, people weren't buying multiple copies of the books in a group.
Which brings us back to the charts- looking just at 1980 - 1983, we can see that almost 2 million core books (PHB+DMG) were sold. Two. Million. Books. Contrasting this with the revenue numbers from Game Wizards, we see that revenues didn't plummet in 1984. TSR was still selling a lot of stuff. Just not the core rule books. Which makes perfect sense! The market was saturated, and the fad period was ending. The people that wanted the rules books to play had already bought them in the prior four years. But the fad was over- there wasn't massive numbers of new people starting to play; it had gone from a broadly-popular fad "that everyone is doing" to a niche game. And the sales figures show that the last fad year was 1983. The collapse had already started by 1984.
And this matters, because all of those famous incidents? The 60 Minutes Special with Pulling and Gygax? That was 1985. The Jack Chick tract? Made in 1984, first widely available in 1985. The issue is that the timing just doesn't work; D&D was facing some pushback here and there in the early 80s, but the sustained issues didn't start until 1985.
Did the Satanic Panic hurt actual people? Definitely.
Did it affect sales? Sure, at the margins there were people that would have played, but could not because of their families/church groups/etc. Arguably, that may have been counterbalanced by the people that played because they heard of it through the free media.
But was the Satanic Panic responsible for the collapse in sales in 1984? No- the timing doesn't match up.
4. What Did the Satanic Panic Do to D&D?
I was incandescently indignant that anyone would use the combination microphone / camera / tracking device I carried with me everywhere to snoop on me.
The Satanic Panic had a massive impact despite not causing the 1984 crash, and I hope that people use the comments (if they chose to) to tell any stories that they might have. Schools that used to have after-school D&D groups were forced to cancel those activities. Parents would not let their teens play (and many people had to hide the fact that they played). There's a lot of sad, and unnecessary, stories, about how the moral panic affected D&D players.
But I want to address (briefly!) two other issues that rarely get talked about. The first is the one I mentioned above- because of the changing customer demographics, and because of the rising moral panic, TSR began changing its products. The 1982 Code of Ethics, the change in art direction, even the later change from Deities & Demigods to Legends and Lore. TSR was self-censoring, and I would argue that the change in direction is noticeable.
The second ... well, look at those graphs again (or look at all the others collected or the financial numbers). Here's the thing- 1984 was the crash. But 1985 stabilized at a lower level, and then there's another drop. We often misremember decades- but the Satanic Panic wasn't ... "the 1980s". It was something that really began to gain steam in the mid-80s and didn't really exhaust itself until '93 for '95. The Satanic Panic acted, IMO, as an anchor on TSR's RPG sales in the late '80s, which in turn was the impetus for many of the design choices made in ... 2e.
Zeb Cook is probably the most underrated and under-appreciated designer of the TSR era. IMO. With that in mind, it is obvious that the 2e core books were designed around the Satanic Panic.
So after a few years of thought, I realized that while I was one-hundred and crazy percent right (as I always am) when I first looked at the issue, I was remiss in not looking at the larger impact- both the subtle ways TSR was self-censoring prior, and to the way that the continued drag on sales after the crash would have such a profound impact on the initial ruleset of 2e.
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