50 Years of D&D: You Can't Copyright Fun

THIS YEAR MARKS the 50th anniversary of the original edition of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), the granddaddy of tabletop role-playing games and one of the urtexts of nerd culture.

- C.J. Ciaramella

The golden anniversary could hardly have come at a better time; over the past decade, the game has undergone an unexpected renaissance, reaching levels of cultural saturation and sales that exceed even its 1980s heyday. Critical Role, a live-play D&D podcast, sold out London’s 12,000seat Wembley Arena last October. Even a passingly good Dungeons & Dragons movie helped mark the game’s half-centennial.

If it seems strange that something as anachronistic and exquisitely dorky as D&D is popular again, consider that those qualities may be exactly why people are drawn to it. The Atlantic recently reported that Americans are suffering a “kind of ritual recession, with fewer community-based routines” and face-to-face meetups. It’s perhaps not surprising that D&D has become a redoubt for old-fashioned, goofy fun in our digital age.

But there’s another reason D&D has weathered 50 years of critical successes and failures: It radically empowered its fans to create their own adventures and games, keeping the tabletop gaming hobby alive even when its flagship was floundering. The 50-year history of D&D is an entrepreneurial success story, yes, but it’s also a story of the advantages of an open-source, loose approach to intellectual property, and the disadvantages of being miserly with it.

When Gary Gygax, a Wisconsin war-gaming enthusiast, published the first edition of D&D in 1974, he was unemployed and cobbling shoes in his basement for spare cash. He had to recruit business partners and form their own company, TSR, to publish the game, because every major board game company passed on it.