Surveying the Gen X landscape and the origins of geek
December, 1980. (Walter McCardell/Baltimore Sun)
DM attacks girl who shushed him with +1 dagger for 5 damage. Girl dies (she was a level one magic user). Game continues.
Wish I knew what was going on here, but no caption came with the photo.
(Photo via Tribune Photo Archives)
Via Joey Hack/Flickr. Location not given. I spy with my little eye not one but two briefcases (one of them doubling as a DM screen), a Champion vest jacket, a reel-to-reel tape machine, a turntable, a black cowboy hat (DM’s prerogative), carpet wall art, and I do believe that’s an open carton of cigarettes on the ashtray on top of the TV. Kid in blue is holding Milton Bradley’s MicroVision, the first handheld video game console.
Bridgeport, Connecticut, 1985, via bander.bramblegrub.
If you haven’t noticed yet, I’m collecting these shots. Even if you’re not into D&D, I think they say something about the time, about who we were and are.
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Circa 1984, care of Lars Adlerz. Ah, yes. The “sadistic” Dungeonmaster plots behind his impenetrable, makeshift fortress. What’s he doing back there? Why does he keep rolling those damn dice? Oh my God he’s going to kill us all!
Son of a bitch. I’d completely forgotten about Dark Tower until I saw this. It came out in 1981, but I don’t know when I got it (I can’t see my parents shelling out $40 for this thing). Maybe in ’82 or ’83, when I had settled into D&D. The TV commercial, starring a decrepit-looking Orson Welles, has become rather famous in the nerd world:
The game of “electronic wizardry” was considered pretty cutting-edge at the time, although I remember it getting pretty boring after only a few plays (probably because I had no one else to play it with). The tower rumbled around in my closet of toys for years, every so often switching on and spitting out those outlandish sound effects.
As I mentioned here, I don’t remember playing the D&D Computer Labyrinth Game (1980), which Dark Tower chased, probably because the price rarely went down on D&D stuff in those days. Even the modules were tremendously expensive. I remember ogling rows and rows of them in the hobby shop.
As for the Ouija Board, let’s be honest, nobody our age who saw The Exorcist (usually after the parental units absolutely forbid it) ever touched the goddamn things. To this day any mention of “Captain Howdy” drives chills through my body.
(Image via WishbookWeb)
These are from WishbookWeb, an absolutely brilliant site where you can find beautiful scans of complete Christmas catalogs all the way back to the ’30s. Yes, my plan is to go through these catalogs (from the ’70s and ’80s, anyway) one page at a time and post the stuff I like and probably circled when making Christmas lists as a kid. (Click images to enlarge.)
Lego may be the single greatest toy line ever produced for kids, and Lego Space, in my opinion, is the company’s greatest achievement. We essentially built our own visions of life in space. Sure, the first time through we followed the directions and built what we saw on the front of the box, but after that the Legos went into giant Tupperware containers with hundreds of other Legos, at which point we relied exclusively on imagination. Unfortunately, Legos have always been too expensive. All the kids in my neighborhood would have to get together and combine Lego forces to produce our individual and collective masterpieces. Nobody ever went home with the same Legos they brought to the table. And that was okay.
I had a lot of fun playing (mostly with myself) Crossbows and Catapults, until all those goddamn caroms got lost. A hundred years from now, if the houses we grew up in are still standing, the inhabitants will still be digging these things out from the crevasses. And they would really fly, man, especially if you double-wrapped the rubber bands on the catapults.
It’s funny to see all the satanic D&D stuff (notice the Endless Quest books?) in a respectable catalog. I remember seeing the Star Frontiers ads in the comics of the day, but I never had it or played it (apparently some of the old folks still play it today). The Star Trek RPG came out in ’82, although I was too into D&D at the time to notice.
(Via Grognardia)
Awesome, but what does it mean? He’s going home to play D&D by himself because the other kids are total dicks? You can’t DM yourself, buddy. I tried it, believe me. And the Basic Set had only one very short solo adventure.
2 Warps to Neptune 