D&D: Happy Birthday! Forty-Five Years of Adventures
Dungeons and Dragons celebrates forty-five years of adventure this week–and, according to the date on the copyright documents, today is its birthday.
Although like many things relegated to antiquity, the actual date of D&D’s “birth” or publication is up for debate. According to the copyright filing documents, which are about as close to official record as we’re likely to get, D&D was first published on January 30th, 1974 (45 years ago today).
But when you look closer, as RPG historian Jon Peterson of Playing at the World does you realize just how up for interpretation this could actually be:
Should we go with that date instead? [The January 30th] date may have just been picked in 1976 to reflect when the game was roughly available; it seems unlikely that there was any moment, back in the informal days of January 1974, when the principles of TSR solemnly declared, “a moment ago this work was not copyrighted but now it is.” Copyright law (before the Copyright Act of 1976) allowed these things to be pretty loose. We know that some of the other registrations done after the fact in this era are unreliable: the for Greyhawk (1975) is about two months off. Moreover, the question of when the text was actually proofed and complete, and thus copyright-able, is distinct from when the game was actually printed, when it was available for order, and when the first copy was actually put together and handed out.
Which reflects the fact that the copyright filing wasn’t done until 1976. And then it gets even hazier because Peterson points out that the Trademark Date (which wasn’t filed until 1977) states that the game was in commerce as of January 15th, 1974.
Peterson himself prefers the last Sunday in January:
I favor a Sunday because it was on Sundays that Gygax invited people to come to his house to trial the game, as I mentioned in my earlier post. But my whole point was that there isn’t a lot of precision to be found in dating the release, so celebrating a few days earlier or later doesn’t do any harm from my perspective.
Whatever the case, this letter from Gary Gygax to Arneson just days from the publication conveys the excitement around the game’s initial release.
Whenever you celebrate it, however you celebrate it, we owe a lot to Dungeons and Dragons. So take a moment to celebrate the last 45 years of adventure and excitement that came from three little books.
What are some of your favorite D&D memories? Leave them in the comments!
