Dungeons & Dragons is 40 Years Old, Retrospective and Q&A
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There's no question that the video game landscape would look a whole lot different if Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson hadn't created Dungeons & Dragons, so I certainly didn't want to miss the opportunity to point out the fact that the tabletop RPG responsible for directly and indirectly inspiring millions of gamers is 40 years old today. And that's led to a retrospective article on Yahoo, as well as part one of a new interview series with several of the game's contributors on Kobold Press. From the former:
D&D wasn't the first game to explore role-playing, but it was the first to do so in a non-wargaming setting and the first to break big. Drawing upon the work of authors like J.R.R. Tolkien and H.P Lovecraft, countless mythologies, and their own vivid imaginations, creators Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson launched the groundbreaking game on January 26, 1974, the best date we have for the game's official birth.
The first version of the game -- called OD&D, for original Dungeons & Dragons -- was a small set of three books. It sold just 1,000 copies in 1974, but tripled sales the next year, and they kept climbing.
The game hit its stride in the 1980s after the release of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, which, between 1977 and 1979, led to three hardcover rulebooks that became indispensable to fans: the Player's Handbook, the Dungeon Master's Guide and the Monster Manual. Further revisions came in 1989, 2000, 2003 and 2008.
To date, Dungeons & Dragons has generated well over $1 billion and has been played by over 20 million people. And that number's expected to rise this year thanks to the release of a new set of rules for the game -- the first update in six years.
The new take, called Tyranny of Dragons, is due this summer and will give players a chance to battle Tiamat, the five-headed queen of the dragons. A constant villain in D&D, Tiamat was also a key character in the memorable Dungeons & Dragons cartoon in the early 80s.
And from the latter (featuring David (Zeb) Cook):
What was the first edition of D&D you played?
(Zeb): The first edition of D&D I played was the original white box (not the woodgrain box, though). Actually at first I think I was playing from bad photocopies. That was back in about 1974-1975, I think, definitely when I was in college. Eventually I found a copy of the box (and had the money to buy it!) at a local campus bookstore. It's a classic early adopter story for D&D.
What's your favorite piece of crunch, fluff, art, or text from that edition?
(Zeb): Typos and the complete lack of explanation of how to do things! There were great typos in the box, some that could really twist meanings % Liar was the best, since some people could and did argue it meant what it said. DMs and players could go to lengths creating justifications for why that stat was needed. Then there were the charts and tables that didn't really explain how they were used. You just had to puzzle it out.
