Playing Defense: TSR, the Satanic Panic, and the Price of Survival

The Satanic Panic has emerged as one of the most popular of origin myths for the hobby. Nowdays it usually tends to take the form of a comic tale, involving gullible parents, self-interested evangelists, naive journalists, and a game company whose survival of a decade of hostile attacks can only be understood as a miracle. In this account, TSR is the underdog, Dungeons & Dragons the misunderstood art form, and the moral entrepreneurs who targeted them are figures of retrospective ridicule.

This version is not entirely false, but it is far from complete. What took place was a genuine scare, and the pressures applied by its protagonists were both sincere and sustained. The responses of the company involved were not those of an organization confident of victory, but of a besieged firm making concessions and adjustments it hoped would prove only temporary. To understand those decisions, it is necessary to view the panic itself not as a joke but as a serious phenomenon in history with its own structure and logic.