Press & Coverage
How the game was seen from outside — and from inside the hobby's own pages. Convention reports, the panic years, the trade press, and the archive's own ancestors. Every entry was read first-hand before it shipped here; the eBay link hunts a physical copy of the issue. The archive's own library also holds complete runs of The Strategic Review (all 7 issues) and Dragon #1–50.
| Date | Outlet | Title | What it says | Copy |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1968-08 (days after Aug 24) | Beloit Daily News (outlet identification inferred) | Report on the first Gen Con (headline not recovered) | A reporter covered Gygax's Lake Geneva convention and described the attendees as "a group of well-mannered, well-dressed intellects," singling out the host — per Jon Peterson, the first mainstream-media attention his gaming ever received. | eBay |
| 1968-11/12 | The General (Avalon Hill) | Convention at Lake Geneva — Vol. 5, No. 4 cover story | Avalon Hill's house magazine put Gen Con I on its cover: the 96 attendees praised, chairman Gygax profiled as a "typical 30-ish mid-west family man who might sell insurance." The hobby press's first draft of the convention's history. | eBay |
| 1969 (before Aug 23) | Chicago Daily News | Advance notices for Gen Con II (headlines not recovered) | Chicago's afternoon daily previewed the second Lake Geneva convention and "liberally quoted" Gygax — then a Chicago insurance executive commuting from Lake Geneva. | eBay |
| 1970-01 | The General (Avalon Hill) | Club of the Month: The International Federation of Wargaming | Avalon Hill's magazine profiles the IFW — Gen Con's founding federation — in its Jan–Feb 1970 issue: the first Geneva Convention (1968) 'gave it the shot in the arm it needed' through the 'untiring efforts of Gary Gygax and Bill Hoyer,' membership 'skyrocketed' to 275 after the second, and IFW officers tell the story to a midwest syndicated news service. The earliest magazine feature documenting Gen Con's first two years. | eBay |
| 1976-08-26 | Lake Geneva Regional News | Wargamers Deploy At Ninth Convention | A full page-9 feature with photo on GenCon IX in the hometown paper: well over 1,300 attendees at Horticultural Hall, the convention sponsored by TSR Hobbies of Lake Geneva, tournament play photographed. Gygax is quoted calling wargaming "probably the fastest growing hobby in the United States" and this the most successful convention they had run; the piece closes with tentative plans for GenCon X at the Playboy Resort the next year. | eBay |
| 1977-06/07 | White Dwarf (Games Workshop) | White Dwarf #1 — the UK hobby press is born | Ian Livingstone edits Games Workshop's glossy successor to Owl & Weasel, explicitly modeled on Dragon: 24 pages, D&D as the main focus — reviews, new classes, scenarios. For its first hundred issues this is Britain's D&D magazine, before it becomes Warhammer-only. | eBay |
| 1977-08-25 | Lake Geneva Regional News | "Checking the Rules" — GenCon X photo, p. 9 | The hometown paper's own photograph of the last Lake Geneva Gen Con: wargamers at a hex-map table during a large-scale Napoleonic tournament game. The caption records the four-day wargames convention split between Horticultural Hall and the Playboy Resort and Country Club, with prizes for tournament winners — the only contemporaneous hometown coverage found in the convention-week issues. | eBay |
| 1977-10 | Craft, Model & Hobby Industry Magazine | Gen Con X Smash Success | The hobby trade press reports the tenth and last Lake Geneva Gen Con, at the Playboy Club — and Gygax's announcement that Gen Con XI moves to UW–Parkside for room. The con outgrows its hometown. | eBay |
| 1979-02/03 | Different Worlds (Chaosium) | Different Worlds #1 — Chaosium's all-hobby magazine | Tadashi Ehara and Greg Stafford launch the first magazine to cover the whole role-playing hobby rather than one house: D&D variants, RuneQuest, Traveller, the "My Life & Role-Playing" designer essays, and from #2 the industry-gossip column "A Letter from Gigi." 47 issues across three publishers (1979–87) chronicle the industry's first decade. | eBay |
| 1979-08/09 | The State News (MSU) & national wire coverage | The disappearance of James Dallas Egbert III | MSU's student paper broke the story; PI William Dear's steam-tunnel D&D theory was repeated by national outlets as fact — the panic's spark and D&D's first national press, almost none of it true. Egbert was found alive Sept 13, 1979. | eBay |
| 1981-09 | Delacorte Press | Mazes and Monsters (novel) — Rona Jaffe | Bestselling novelist's cautionary tale built on the garbled Egbert headlines: a campus role-playing game tips a student into psychosis. The panic's bridge from news to fiction to screen. | eBay |
| 1982-12-28 | CBS | Mazes and Monsters (TV movie) | CBS Tuesday Night Movie adaptation of Jaffe's novel, dir. Steven Hilliard Stern; Tom Hanks in his first lead role, as a gamer who can no longer tell the game from reality. | eBay |
| 1983 | B.A.D.D. (Richmond, VA) | Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons founded — Patricia Pulling | After her son Irving's death (June 9, 1982) and the dismissal of her lawsuits against his principal and TSR, Pulling founded BADD and ran the panic's press operation for a decade. | eBay |
| 1984 | Chick Publications | Dark Dungeons — Jack T. Chick | The panic's most durable artifact: Chick's tract comic in which D&D is literal witchcraft recruitment, ending with the manuals burned. Still in print; linked piece is Jon Michaud's New Yorker history (Nov 2, 2015). | eBay |
| 1984 | Houghton Mifflin | The Dungeon Master: The Disappearance of James Dallas Egbert III — William Dear | The private investigator's own account, five years on: the steam-tunnel D&D theory was his invention, repeated by the press unchallenged. The panic's first draft, corrected by its author. | eBay |
| 1985-09-15 | CBS — 60 Minutes | Dungeons & Dragons segment, reported by Ed Bradley | The panic's mainstream peak: Bradley interviews Gygax, Pulling, and Dr. Thomas Radecki, who links the game to 28 suicides and murders on air. Full recording survives at archive.org. | eBay |
| 1990 | Michael A. Stackpole | The Pulling Report | The rebuttal that ended it: a point-by-point audit of BADD's evidence and Pulling's credentials, building on his 1989 Game Hysteria and the Truth. Pulling left BADD after publication; by 1991 the CDC and suicidology bodies found no causal link between gaming and suicide. | eBay |
| 1993-12 | The Dragon (TSR) | Dragon #200 — the bicentennial issue | The 200th issue of TSR's flagship magazine (editor-in-chief Kim Mohan): Ed Greenwood's 'The Wizards Three,' Bruce Heard's Known World Grimoire for Mystara, an adventure module by Greenwood, and Margaret Weis fiction — a fat milestone number, seven years before issue #359 closed the print run in 2007. | eBay |
| 1999 | Wizards of the Coast | Dragon Magazine Archive — the first 250 issues on CD-ROM | The game's own archive move: all 250 issues of Dragon plus the seven issues of The Strategic Review — every page, covers and ads included — on five CD-ROMs with keyword search. Withdrawn over reprint-rights conflicts (the Knights of the Dinner Table strips) and now a collector's item in its own right; the direct ancestor of every digital D&D archive since. | eBay |
| 2007-04-19 | Paizo Publishing / Wizards of the Coast | Dragon and Dungeon print runs end — announced | Joint press release: WotC declines to renew Paizo's licenses; Dragon ends with #359 and Dungeon with #150, both September 2007, with commemorative final issues. The end of D&D's print-magazine era after 31 years. | eBay |
| 2007-09 | Dragon (Paizo) | Dragon #359 — the final print issue | The last printed Dragon ships (to subscribers Aug 7, 2007): 359 issues since June 1976. WotC relaunches Dragon online with #360, continuing the numbering to #430 (Dec 2013). | eBay |
| 2015-04-30 | Wizards of the Coast / Dialect | Dragon+ launches — Dragon goes digital-native | WotC and agency Dialect launch Dragon+ as a free digital magazine app, restarting numbering at #1: the Dragon name's third life, after print (1976–2007) and the online edition (2007–2013). | eBay |