Designers & Dragons: The Column
The Best Sellers of the '70s and '80s
I'm not immediately aware of any sales reports listing what the best-selling RPGs of the '70s and '80s were. However, we have several individual anecdotes which together start to paint a portrait of the era.
For fantasy games, D&D (1974) was of course the first mover and the best seller. Tunnels & Trolls (1976) soon appeared as the #2 game, but it wouldn't hold that position. RuneQuest (1978) and MERP (1984) later rose up as best-sellers in their time, though the question of how they related to each other is hazy.
In other genres, the answers are more obvious.
- Traveller (1977) was the top SF game for some time, but was eventually overtaken by Star Wars (1987) and Cyberpunk (1988). It's possible Star Frontiers (1982) outsold it too, as it was TSR's second best-supported RPG in the early 80's.
- Call of Cthulhu (1981) held the horror mantle throughout this period, though Vampire: The Masquerade (1991) would rise up when the '80s were done.
- The first real superhero success is Champions (1981), though the original Marvel Super Heroes (1984) would eventually outsell it.
In foreign markets, bestsellers were influenced heavily by what was being imported and what was being reprinted locally. Thus the history of Games Workship (pages 43-52) tells how games like RuneQuest and Traveller found particular attention in the UK due to GW's low-cost reprints of those product lines. Tunnels & Trolls was another game that did well on British stores due to local reprints.
Finally, some attention should be given to the supplements market. In the '70s, Judges Guild was a juggernaut, primarily thanks to their D&D, AD&D, and "Generic" supplements—which they published in high quantities (and sometimes low qualities) not seen again until the d20 boom.
And this was the state of the RPG market as we understand it, prior to the '90s, by which time we have slightly better information.
The Best Sellers of the '90s
For a short time in the mid ‘90s, White Wolf Magazine published monthly lists of the top-selling RPGs based on figures from Hobby Games Distributors. Today, they provide an interesting snapshot of the ‘90s RPG industry. Their composite lists from '92 and '93 follow.
Top RPG Books of 1992: White Wolf
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If you need proof that the RPG industry was at least a bit less frontlist driven before the release of Magic: The Gathering, the inclusion of the 11-year old Fiend Folio in this list says it all. It's also interesting to note the fairly random "Complete" book on this list (with more in the 1993 list, below), which shows why splat books became popular in this era. (People bought them.)
As was the case until 1997, TSR was the top-seller thanks to D&D. In 1992, it was followed by FASA and White Wolf, probably in that order. Though Palladium Books was a rising star in 1992, its top Rifts books only made #18 and #19 for the year.
Top RPG Books of 1993: White Wolf
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By 1993, White Wolf had probably pushed up to #2, while Palladium was slowly overtaking FASA as the #3 RPG producer. Of course, they were both being overshadowed by Wizards of the Coast’s release of Magic: The Gathering (1993), which outsold every RPG on this list due to the differing economics of the new medium.
The Best Sellers of Today
If anyone would like to offer up best seller lists from 1994-2009 in the forums, I'd love to see them (and include them in a future data article). For now, however, I'm skipping up to 2010, where I got several data points thanks to individual retailers.
| Top RPG Books of 2010: Zombie Planet Zombie Planet (www.zombie-planet.com)—the Albany, New York game store run by George Vasilakos of Eden Studios—recorded the following top-selling RPG books for 2010.
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This is perhaps the most typical of the three 2010 RPG lists I've included here, showing the strong dominance of D&D. It's more surprising that Gamma World—which had been a perennial also-ran for both TSR and Wizards of the Coast—sold well, a result upheld by the other stores. The inclusion of Savage Worlds is somewhat surprising too, but I think it correctly points out Pinnacle (with Savage Worlds) as a notable RPG producer, if not necessary one of the top two or three.
Something that's no longer surprising is the creep of Paizo products into top ten. By 2010, FASA was long gone and Palladium had long-ago dropped from the top tier of RPG companies. 2010 was probably the year that White Wolf fell off that tier as well, primarily due to a large-scale halt in production. It's very likely that Paizo rose up to fill that #2 spot in 2010. I think that when we see the lists for 2011, we'll see even more Paizo products among the top sellers.
| Top RPG Books of 2010: Modern Myths Modern Myths (www.modern-myths.com) is a comic book and games store located in Northhampton, Massachusetts. They listed the following top-selling RPG books for 2010.
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Modern Myths similarly showed off the dominance of D&D 4e and Gamma World, but without any competing Pathfinder—demonstrating how gaming cultures can vary from store to store. It also has one surprising entry: The Dresden Files Roleplaying Game by Evil Hat. It's pretty shocking to see an indie game—the sort of thing being produced in low numbers just several years before—as a top-seller, but Evil Hat's very open sales information paints the same picture: Evil Hat sold 9232 copies of Your Story in 2010, a number that any RPG company but Wizards and Paizo (and perhaps FFG) would be extremely pleased with.
| Top RPG Books of 2010: EndGame EndGame (www.endgameoakland.com)—an Oakland, California game store—recorded the following top-selling RPG products for 2010. The store’s strong support of indie games is clearly shown in the results.
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Endgame agrees with the other stores that show the dominance of D&D and the good sales of Savage Worlds. It also has a lot of indie books, but that's because it's a game store that really pushes indies. Other than The Dresden Files it's likely that most indies don't sell this well elsewhere. However, the advantage of this Endgame list is that it shows us what some of the top indie RPGs might be.
The Favorites of All-Time
Best-seller lists are certainly one way to see which RPGs have prospered over the years, but you can also take another methodology, looking at those games which have been well-received.
| Best RPG List: Arcane In issue #14 (Christmas, 1996) British RPG magazine Arcane produced a list of its readers’ top 50 RPGs. The top 20, in order, are listed below.
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With 15 years of RPGs come and gone since 1996, the list is a bit dated now, but it’s still an interesting snapshot of UK RPG interest in the mid ‘90s. It’s probably no accident that of the top seven items, all but #6, Vampire, were either produced by Games Workshop or else reprinted by Games Workshop in the 1980s. As I write in Designers & Dragons, GW had a tremendous effect on how the roleplaying culture evolved in the UK.
Beyond that, I find it interesting to consider which of these games have prospered and which have faded away. I think Bushido is the game that would be most obscure in the modern day (in large part due to the latter-day history of FGU, as described on pages 71-78), though many others have long ago ceased publication. I also think this rating, done in 1996, caught White Wolf at the height of their popularity. It seems unlikely to me that you'd find three White Wolf products in the top twenty of most modern listings--though Vampire: The Masquerade continues to be a pivotal book for the industry and I think few would argue that Wraith: The Oblivion was at least as notable as a game design.
| Best RPG List: Hobby Games In Hobby Games: The 100 Best (2007), editor James Lowder collated a list of 100 well-loved hobbyist games, with essays by other designers explaining their charms. The list included board games, miniatures games, and also RPGs. The latter are listed here in alphabetical order:
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To me, the Hobby Games feels more like a list of historically important games than a set of "favorites". Every game on the list gets some serious attention in Designers & Dragons with the exception of My Life With Master (which does still receive a few notes in the Adept Press article, pages 403-411, because its winning of the Diana Jones award pointed toward the mainstream acceptance of indie games).
Amber was the first really successful Diceless game and one of the earliest games in the later indie vein; Ars Magica was the immediate precursor of White Wolf's releases just a few years later; Call of Cthulhu was the dominant horror game until the release of White Wolf's World of Darkness a decade later … etc.
So, I guess that says that Hobby Games: The 100 Best ain't a bad bit of complementary reading for Designers & Dragons.
| Best RPG List: RPGnet RPGNet’s strong support of modern games and smaller presses is obvious in the top-20 RPG list available from its Gaming Index (index.rpg.net).
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I figured the RPGnet Gaming Index was a great place to end things, as it offers a much more modern look at favorites. Unlike the older Arcane listing, everything here is actually in-print or at the least was in-print relatively recently. Nonetheless, I suspect that some releases like Tribe 8 and BESM are destined to fade away as the market leaves them behind.
The list shown above is actually not quite the same as the list that I submitted to Mongoose. I updated it based on the position of games on 9/24/11, which was 6 or 7 months after my initial submission. About half of the games moved up or down a little bit. The highest-ranked change was King Arthur Pendragon which climbed from 4th to 3rd (dropping Unknown Armies by one spot). The most dramatic change was Starblazer Adventures which sank from #9 to #12 (or, if you prefer Over the Edge, Angel, and Talislanta all gained ground).
One of the cool elements of the RPGnet Gaming Index is, of course, that you can add your own opinions. Just hop over to index.rpg.net and log in with your RPGnet Forum Name, then go rate your collection. Maybe in a year or two, we can see how things have changed …
Conclusion
Much of Designers & Dragons is based on interviews, game design notes, ads, editorials, and company reports. It's all slightly fuzzy information (as I learned when reading interviews with some designers, where facts changed over the decades). These boxes of sales and polling information were intended to add some hard data to the book's discussions. But, I also think they're interesting in themselves, to show how our hobby has changed over the decades.
I'm going to finish out the year in December with a look at the comic book history of D&D, which is intended as a complement to the "Dungeons, Dragons, and Computers" article that you can find on pages 20-21 of Designers & Dragons.
