Pacific-Northwest-based Dungeons & Dragons is on a roll

When you hear the words Dungeons & Dragons, you may think of hit TV shows like “Stranger Things” or “The Big Bang Theory.” Maybe you played yourself as a kid, or play now as an adult. Or maybe you’ve never played, but listen or watch one of the hundreds of D&D podcasts or live streams featuring both celebrities and everyday players.

The fantasy role-playing game was co-created by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, and based loosely on a form of miniature wargaming that had become more popular in the 1950s and ’60s. Knowing he had a hit on his hands, Gygax took the idea for Dragons to Avalon Hill, the largest publisher of wargames and strategic board games at the time. But the company wasn’t interested, not being able to understand a game that had no winners or losers. So Gygax instead formed a company called Tactical Studies Rules to self-publish the game in 1974.

For years, the game sat somewhere on the fringes of pop culture, but in the late 80′s and early 90′s, the so-called “moral panic” helped fuel conspiracies that linked the game to everything from witchcraft to suicides to Satanism. By the mid-90′s, the controversies had manifested into rising sales of the game and Renton, Washington-based Wizards of the Coast started to take note. As the creators of Magic: The Gathering, the game publisher saw the potential for a cross-over audience and purchased TSR, Inc. in 1997.