Iosue
Legend
The Egbert case in 1979 drove tremendous growth in 1980 and 1981.Fantastic show so far - I’m up to Chapter 7 The Snake Pit now.
There are a few things that I wish I could ask based on interviews I’ve heard from folks like Jim Ward. Ward swore up and down that the Satanic Panic had companies like JC Penney ready to pull their account with TSR which was his defense for why devils and demons in the book went away and were replaced with baatezu and tanarii. However, Episode 6 makes it sound like sales went gangbusters due to the Satanic Panic and the Penney’s account was gained in the midst or even after most of the Egbert and BADD stuff had occurred.
The Satanic Panic is a later phenomenon that continued to dog TSR through the mid-80s. As mentioned in the latest episode, Gygax's appearance on 60 Minutes with Pat Pulling of BADD (founded in 1983) was in 1985, a month before he was ousted from TSR.
Edit: This graph provided by Ben Riggs is instructive. AD&D hits a high peak in 1983 and then craters. There's no gradual decline: 1,031,200 in 1983, to about 430,000 units in 1984, holds steady at about 350,000 units in 1985, and then less than 200,000 units in 1986.
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