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Post by Starbeard on Jul 2, 2022 15:19:22 GMT -6
Probably the most salient evidence to the specific issue of the Dragon ads is to look for the Heritage ads in the first six issues of Dragon, and then the lack thereof in subsequent issues. There was lots of other miscellaneous drama wrapped up in their dispute with TSR, but that's at least one that leaves a pretty obvious paper trail. Tim Kask would say that Dragon simply oversold ads for those issues after #6, and that there were policies that governed how they granted priority, but it's a pretty murky matter. Ah, I see now that I missed the sentence about TSR actually dropping an ad, not just that there was a fear of them doing so. From the text I thought it was a very quick turnaround as well, but I guess this was the better part of a year between the closing of the deal with MiniFigs and the dropped Heritage ad. I don't really have much experience hunting down district court cases. For the timeline, it's positively certain that Heritage filed after only after learning that the ad would be/was dropped from Dragon 7? It's interesting to note that the other fantasy figure manufacturers still get their full page ads in Dragon 7, just not Heritage. A year is a long time for relations to have soured to the point where TSR was already looking for ways to cease business with Heritage. Who knows, maybe Oden called them up about his concerns in good faith and Tim Kask answered the phone. increment I know it isn't in your professional or personal interest to speculate on the unknowables, but with no stake in the matter I'm happy to! On the face of it, I'd guess the TSR - Heritage bond was already cracking prior to the ad fiasco. |
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Post by rsdean on Jul 3, 2022 4:18:59 GMT -6
This is a slight tangent, but I am sitting here this morning wondering how much impact the Dragon ads made on me, as a teenaged gamer out in the hinterlands, away from Lake Geneva. Heritage was one of the companies generally stocked by my local hobby/game store at that time, so I had quite a few Heritage minis in my collection, but I never really considered mail ordering minis, so my purchases were more dependent on what was in the shop. So I doubt that I even notice the loss of an advertiser. (I’m not sure why, by the way, as I did order board games from AH and SPI in those years…)
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Post by Finarvyn on Jul 3, 2022 4:41:19 GMT -6
Agreed. I can't think of much I ordered through the years just because I saw an ad in Dragon. Actually, only two come to mind offhand -- Judges Guild subscription, and Amber Diceless. Of course, I wasn't really into minis at that stage of my gaming life so maybe that would have affected my interest in minis advertisements.
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Post by Starbeard on Jul 3, 2022 8:36:11 GMT -6
I'd really like to see a state of the industry table a bit like the annual Barasch list, but with a split on how much of each company's revenue was made direct sale vs distributed wholesale.
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Post by Starbeard on Jul 6, 2022 22:00:07 GMT -6
A gentler observation: by my calculations, I guess Tom Hanks would have been playing D&D sometime around 1975-77 in Hayward and/or Sacramento. Do we know anything about a CSU Sacramento club?
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Post by grodog on Jul 9, 2022 9:42:34 GMT -6
Heritage was one of the companies generally stocked by my local hobby/game store at that time, so I had quite a few Heritage minis in my collection, but I never really considered mail ordering minis, so my purchases were more dependent on what was in the shop. So I doubt that I even notice the loss of an advertiser. I wasn’t reading Dragon until mid-1982, so this was all long-dead history by the time Dragon became integral to my gaming (which it did, hugely so). That said, Heritage and Holmes were my intros to the game, so I’m right there with you rsdean, about Heritage’s availability and impact on my early gaming: grodog.blogspot.com/2018/05/grodogs-start-in-gaming-1977.htmlAllan. |
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Post by grodog on Jul 9, 2022 9:53:50 GMT -6
A gentler observation: by my calculations, I guess Tom Hanks would have been playing D&D sometime around 1975-77 in Hayward and/or Sacramento. Do we know anything about a CSU Sacramento club? I don’t know about a specific club, but Alan Lucien is still in Sacramento, and many local folks got started gaming through him: see web.archive.org/web/20060131034744/http://www.avalanchepress.com/backtothetable.php for example. When I corresponded with Shane in 2005 about his time with Alan, he mentioned that Alan was also heavily-involved with the local SCA (which was the case with several of the Chaosium crowd in the SF Bay Area too). So the SCA may have been as prominent an influence on an actor as a gaming club, perhaps? Allan. |
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