The Original D&D Streaming Show – The Long-Lost Radio Play
Before Matthew Mercer, before Acquisitions Incorporated, before anyone had streamed anything, Dungeons & Dragons had their very own radio play.
Livestreamed games are a familiar part of the tabletop RPG landscape now. It’s one of the most accessible parts of the hobby.
Shows like Critical Role and Dimension 20 can give anyone a glimpse into D&D, no books needed. The same goes for other systems as well, you can find people playing through hacks of games powered by the apocalypse, and you can find people playing Blades in the Dark.
But back before there were live streams, the RPG industry struggled with reaching an audience. Wargamers were the core audience, and the game exploded rapidly through their ranks. But for a while, it seemed to hit a wall through which it could not break. Breaching through to the mainstream was one of TSR’s white whales. For a while, one solution looked like it might take D&D to the airwaves in the form of a D&D Radio Play.
The D&D Radio Play Adventure
For most of the history of the RPG industry though, reaching an audience has been a major problem. Taking a game and making it mainstream enough that non-gamers can find their way into it is a continuous hurdle that Gary Gygax and the folks at TSR tried to overcome during the company’s almost 40-year history. And while TSR’s D&D never had a movie or a big screen, they did pave the way. One of the closest examples was with a proto-actual play podcast. Although this was back in the days when podcasts were called radio shows. So step back in time with us and let’s have a listen to the Dungeons and Dragons radio show pilot.
In the early 1980s, at the height of the Dungeons & Dragons fad, TSR heavily promoted the game in mainstream media. This went far beyond mere advertisements: they developed dramatic renditions of D&D as media properties. The most famous result was the Saturday morning cartoon show, though we know of many other projects that never quite made it into production, such as the undeveloped feature film. We must now add to that category a new entry: a syndicated radio program. Unlike the cartoon show or the movie, the planned radio series depicted the actual play of a D&D session rather than dramatizing a loosely-related story: in that respect, it is a long-lost ancestor of contemporary media sensations like Critical Role or Acquisitions Inc. Today, as a special “audio” edition of Playing at the World, we take a listen to the original pilot for the radio show, and consider its relevance to the game spectatorship culture of today.
If that sounds like any live stream today, you’d be right. Sure, it’s a little cheesier, but the production value is a little higher. After all, these are professionals. There’s another clip as well, also commented on by Jon Peterson of Playing at the World, as well as through the lens of the Dragon Talk Podcast.
Ultimately, the show would never find its audience. The D&D Radio Play was ahead of its time. And TSR was in utter turmoil at the time. Not only had it split into four companies, in the midst of a bid for leadership. But it also was dealing with an issue of oversaturation.
While the radio play never found success, it did help lead to one piece of D&D media that remains beloved to this day.
But the D&D Cartoon was not the only piece of D&D media created. Gygax also managed to get a script made for a never-produced Dungeons & Dragons movie that proves that there is never a good time to make a D&D movie. And while the Radio Show would never catch on, its concept was solid. Something that could introduce players to the game, both immersing them in the story while also showing them how to play by example. Because one of the biggest problems with D&D is getting the concept across to new players.
A lot has changed since the days of the 1980s, and in the ensuing 40-odd years, a lot of work has been done to bring fantasy into the mainstream. Video games helped bring D&D into a different swath of gamers’ homes, movies like the Lord of the Rings helped set the tone for a new generation, and D&D’s influence grew like thirsting tendrils as a generation raised on games like D&D matriculated into society. But one thing has remained challenging, which is setting an example of play. There’s a world of difference between reading through a D&D book and actually playing the game.
But until you see it in action until you have the basic vocabulary of “Hey this is how a game works” it’s not the most practical advice. Once you’ve played, sure, you can pore through the rules to understand interactions – but just like video games and their tutorial levels slowly introduce the concept of play to new players, D&D needed to establish a basic vocabulary. Which is where the radio show would have come in. It was only a quarter-century ahead of its time. Sadly, only the pilot episode ever happened, otherwise, we’d probably all be listening to the syndicated episodes of it.
Happy adventuring!
