History of Role Playing Games: Part 2

"Hi my name is Barry Osser from North Coast Role Playing in Eureka, California and I’m here today to talk to you about the history of role playing. Now we kind of fast forward to 1984 – 1985 and in that time period we’ve suddenly had just about 10 years so about a half generation movement in the industry. In ‘84 – ’85, TSR came back and started producing box sets and things that looked more important on the shelf, thicker boxes, brighter covers, brighter colors and they also started getting into box stores which helped sales and move the whole industry forward. Our next big jump was up to ’89 and in 1989 a collection of companies put out major product, 89 and 90 we saw an advent of a company called white wolf which pretty much brought the horror genre into the industry. Another company Kaosy had had a game called Call of Cthulhu which was from the HP Love Craft books, but it never quite got the height, the huge hit that white wolf’s vampire setting was able to get. At that point you also got Palatium produced a product called rips which was a multi genres cross all genres game that you were able to play kind of anything you want, I’m going to take my wizard and go beat the hell out of your space marine, that kind of thing. And in 89 there was also a big move to thicker games, games with more background, games with more history, and games with more of what people needed to play them. In 89 to keep up with them TSR went ahead and came out with their 2nd edition of the advanced Dungeons and Dragons game. We jump forward now and I think the next big shake up was probably in 91 or 92 when we went into the 1st Gulf War and we suddenly lost a huge number of people. The military has been a good place to learn gaming and find out about gaming, most of the companies will send products to the military people over seas and in camps and barracks here in the United States and when that huge surge of people went to the Gulf, we lost a lot of our buying power. A lot of companies went under, a lot of business went under and the industry became meaner and leaner and so they moved forward again trying to give you more for you buck, draw the people back in. so from about 92 to about 95 we saw a ton of companies come up with little teeny games or what we call orphan games and these games would have one or two ideas in them that are new, and most everything else was older, but they would generally have some kind of a background to them, something connective. That’s really where we started seeing the major licenses come out, the licenses like Star Trek or Star Wars or even Dune started coming out at that point."