“Turn on the Technology” with the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons First Quest CD Game

This two-page spread from a 1994 issue of Ghost Rider 2099 comes from before the collapse of TSR, back when the company was sinking everything they had into keeping the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons relevant and on shelves. By 1994, the game was losing ground to White Wolf’s RPGs and the trading card boom, and the CD gimmick in the First Quest game was just one experiment that TSR tried that didn’t really help all that much. The game-in-a-box is a fantastic approach I still appreciate, but audio CDs and VCR tapes never did all that much to bring in new players. Still, it is fun to get a peek at this ad and just imagine how much money TSR sunk into this project.