“Fundamentalists attack game as road to occult” in 1982
The Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game (find at Amazon.com*) was a media monster in the early eighties. Church groups and parents helped the game grow, and articles like this 1982 Associated Press piece did more to increase sales than any advertising could have hoped for. They say there’s no such thing as bad press, and when it comes to the rise of Dungeons & Dragons in the early eighties that was certainly very true.
Related articles
- RPGs Are a 35 Million Dollar Market (out of a 1.19 Billion Dollar Hobby Game Market) (tenkarstavern.com)
- Reading – Car Warriors #1 (1991) (battlegrip.com)
- “Ghouls, Monsters Find New Life In Newest Game Craze” in 1980 (battlegrip.com)
Sadly, plenty of church groups still are funny about D&D; I’ve had people at my church comment negatively on me playing it. There will always be people who just don’t get it. We see it every few years whenever a cultural phenomenon rolls around — Harry Potter was a classic example.
As someone who was born in 82, than hearing about this from older players, it still boggles my mind that it all stemmed from a bad Tom Hanks movie hehe.