Advertising age

Today, James at Grognardia reflects:

When I entered the hobby, if you played a science fiction game, you either played Traveller or Space Opera. I was a Traveller man back then, so Space Opera was one of those games I noticed on game store shelves and whose ads and articles I saw in the pages of Dragon but which I never actually played.

I've already written about how I didn't actually play D&D that much (though I was fascinated by the rulebooks), but I have such strong memories of reading the ads in Dragon—for games I'd never play, for games that I'd never even seen on the shelves. I'm coming to believe that, in their unavailability—shall we call it invisibility?—they were as fascinating to me as the few games (D&D, Gamma World, Top Secret, a few others) that I did play.

Part of the fun of reading Grognardia is that James (who I gather is around my age) will frequently review a game that I recall seeing ads for in Dragon: Bushido (RPG of feudal Japan), Superhero 2044, et al. It's like hearing the other half of a conversation that got broken off decades ago.