I’ve loved gaming conventions from the start. Hell, I liked the idea of conventions before I was able to actually attend one. As a young’en, it gave a sense of legitimacy to my new-found hobby. When I was 12 and first started playing RPGs I knew it was all organized foolishness—the imaginative play of summer outings into wild places beyond the neighborhood taken to some strange rigorous extreme with books, dice and charts. At the same time I sure as hell didn’t want the adults around me to knowing that. A gaming convention made it sound serious—adult. The fact that my first gaming convention took place on the campus of prestigious Columbian University in NYC I believe helped my parents get over the concern over letting me attend one the age of 14.
Maybe they I just wore them down by my persistent pleas for permission to attend.
The Moldvay purple basic set came with the 1982 TSR Hobbies Inc. catalog. This page advertising Gen Con was my first inkling that there was such a thing as a gaming convention. Back then it seemed wondrous and cool. Now it just looks nerdy and dated. Oh how times have changed.
What resulted was definitely not as adult as I imagined. At the time, I believed there were two very distinct stages of life: childhood and freedom. I definitely didn’t get the idea of the college-age child-adult thing somehow living between those two extremes.
So geeks have been around for a long time, but back in the 80’s they were called nerds, freaks, or fucking weirdoes. There were very few pocket protectors and thick black glasses frames. Media stereotypes are rarely that dead-on. There were a lot of bushy beards with slicked-back (with natural grease rather than product) hair, corduroy, and snorting laughter. I remember the first convention D&D game I every played in was run by a fellow who snorted instead of laughing each time he made a clever point. I was so struck with its strangeness, that to this day, I replicate it for comic effect.
There were Pente championships (yes Pente, not Go), Squad Leader, a miniature painting contest, and lots of D&D. I dragged my friend Dave there, and we were both amazed with what we found…part gaming bazaar bizarre the other half just gaming bizarre. We had the time of our lives playing with these strange adults who were even more serious about games than a couple of 14-year-olds living on Staten Island with absolutely nothing better to do.
There were some rough patches.
The first time a college student lit up a joint in the middle of our D&D game, Dave and I began to nervously eye each other wondering if all those whack-jobs claiming that D&D leads to drug abuse and satanic rituals weren’t full of shit after all. Turns out we were just at a college in the 80s. Things probably would have been worse in the 70s.
Other than the strange characters, the good times, and the random bits of drug and alcohol abuse perpetrated by college-age gamers (not me, mom, I swear!) the chief thing I remember from these early shows was there disorganization. A quarter of the events listed in the program book never got off the ground. The quality of the game experience wildly varied from one session to the next. Some games I played were absolutely fantastic. Other times I found my character dead in nearly a minute, the DM going after my character rather than have to deal with a “kid” at his table. Even worse were the games that DMs let me stick around but only to run a character in some strange (sometimes drug-addled) version of D&D where were centaur-like insectoids from the culture who built (and destroyed) Atlantis searching for a tiny nuclear reactor in the middle of a Maya step pyramid on one of Jupiter’s moons…and we had to stop them. Lots of fantasy had a helping of strange science fiction back in the 80s.
But with all the pitfalls, did I mind? Hell no. I didn’t even know better. The bad and the uncertain schedules were just the price of admission. While at times I was disappointed, maybe even pissed, it never even occurred to me it could be better. You have to remember that one of my first memories was sitting in the lines during the first oil crisis in 1973…and then doing it again in 1979. When a restaurant ran out of the entrée you wanted the manager didn’t come out and apologize and offer you a gift certificate for the shortage, you just ordered something else. I know, I know, it’s like I’m telling you how many miles I had to hike to get to school and all, but it’s not like that. The world we live in today, the one where we feel entitled to everything, was just on the lip of happening.
Hell, it’s before game companies really figured out that you could at least attempt to woo fans at gaming conventions, or at least regional gaming conventions…and when that happened, everything changed.