Dungeons & Dragons was a huge part of my formative years.
I liked riding bikes and climbing trees like every red-blooded American boy, but there's only so many ramps you can jump and trees you can climb before you start to wonder if there's something more to life.
Video games at the time didn't really provide an immersive sword & sorcery virtual role-playing experience.
Most of the NES D&D style games were platformers or side-scrollers.
You pressed the buttons a lot and at the end there was a dragon.
To be able to really do whatever you wanted in a fantasy world, you had to buy a D&D rulebook, a pouch of mixed dice, some graph paper, and some automatic pencils, and find four or five other nerds that you could depend on to have a regularly schedule block of free time.
Yes, it was nerdy.
But, fuck you, you judgmental pricks.
We'd figure out who had the most accommodating parent(s) meet up at their house and take over their dining room table for the night.
Sure it was nerdy, but for a low entry cost, we had hundreds of hours of entertainment and we weren't out doing drugs or ringing people's doorbells and leaving behind flaming paper bags with dogshit in them.
Our parents knew where we were and knew who our friends were and we were hanging out and actually interacting with our peers instead of sitting in front of a screen.
I wasn't lucky enough to grow up with George R. R. Martin so the plots for our adventures usually got way out of hand. The "Dungeon Master" was ill-equipped to spontaneously create a Tolkien caliber experience but figuring out how to outsmart the Dungeon Master was part of the fun.
I don't have any regrets about the years I spent playing Dungeons & Dragons and sword & sorcery is still one of my favorite genre of video games to play.
Here's a selection of D&D ads from the pages of The Uncanny X-Men.
