Once Upon a Time, We Forgot to Save the Stories
A call to memory, to preservation, and to the future of our shared world
Once Upon a Time, We Forgot to Save the Stories
A call to memory, to preservation, and to the future of our shared world
Once upon a time, there were games.
Not just the ones you bought. The ones you played. The ones you wrote. The ones you made up at the table because the rules didn’t fit the story you were trying to tell. The ones you sketched out on napkins, wrote in notebooks, passed around at conventions, or mailed to a friend who lived three states away.
And they mattered.
They weren’t just playing. They were identity. They were how we found friends, how we found our voice, how we told stories when the world wouldn’t listen. They helped us figure out who we were. They gave us something to belong to.
And now, too many of them are lost.
Not because they didn’t matter. But because they were never saved. Never scanned, never submitted, and never treated as worthy of preservation.
That’s why we need Archive.org. Because if there is one place still brave enough to say, “This mattered,” it’s there. And if we don’t act now—right now—much of it will disappear.
The 50th Anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons has come. And we missed it. We had the chance to celebrate a legacy, and instead we celebrated a brand.
We had the opportunity to flood the Archive with notes, maps, discussions, and prototypes—and we let it pass. Instead of preserving the path that brought us here, we polished a product and let the paper trail vanish.
Let’s be clear: D&D didn’t come out of nowhere.
It emerged from wargames. From correspondence. From long debates, trial-and-error rule systems, and players testing the limits of what games could do. From the blurry overlap between hobbyists and designers, dreamers and doers. From people who didn’t ask permission and never waited for the official release.
And those early artifacts—the rulebooks, yes, but also the newsletters, the marginalia, the disputes and designs—are being lost faster than we can gather them.
Consider A&E—Alarums & Excursions. This wasn’t just a fanzine. It was a 50-year dialogue. A long, deep, loud, passionate, sprawling conversation that became the birthplace of voices, some of whom went on to become the designers, developers, and editors behind the games we play today.
It didn’t belong to a company. It belonged to us.
We owe it to the future to preserve the full run. Not a “best of.” Not a few highlighted excerpts. The whole thing. Because those pages represent the real-time evolution of role-playing games, they are the emotional, technical, personal, and contradictory story of this hobby. And once it’s gone, it can’t be rebuilt.
And we cannot discuss history without mentioning the RPGA. The Role-Playing Game Association brought structure to chaos. It created organized play long before it became a corporate bullet point. It gave us The Living City, Living Greyhawk, Living Jungle, Living Force, and more.
Through the RPGA, campaigns spanned continents. Players across the world could inhabit the same world, shape its future, and walk into a con game feeling like they were coming home.
From the RPGA grew entire generations of shared storytelling. These were the precursors to modern networks and digital campaign trackers. Before Roll20, before Adventure League, there were paper sign-ins, hard deadlines, and world-shaking modules that hit tables simultaneously across dozens of conventions.
And then there were the conventions.
Not just events, but ecosystems. Memory engines. Breeding grounds. Petri dishes for design, for fandom, for collaboration.
Gen Con. Origins. DundraCon. Winter Fantasy. Glathricon. MarCon. Dragonmeet.
They weren’t just about buying the newest module or getting something signed. They were where the real work took place, where house rules evolved into systems, where friends became publishers, where ideas were pitched over burgers at 3 AM in a hotel bar, where someone shared a printout that would someday become a game line.
These cons were the places we returned to year after year because they felt like home. Not just because of the games, but because of the people. The hallway chats. The pickup games. The panel debates. The slow ritual of leafing through a program book, trying to decide which four-hour slot to give up because you couldn’t bear to miss that one game.
Every handout, every flyer, every con badge, every schedule, every vendor map—these are pieces of our story.
The early Origins programs? Design archaeology. The Gen Con signup sheets? Time capsules. The cassette recordings of seminars? Gold.
We need to digitize them. We need to transcribe them. We need to treat them like they matter, because they do.
We need to sit down with the people who ran those cons. Who built the frameworks? Who watched a sleepy miniatures show become a gathering of thousands? We need to record the stories while we still can.
Conventions were the classroom, the church, and the mirror.
And if we don’t tell their story, it won’t be told.
This isn’t about criticism. This isn’t about judgment. This isn’t about irony or taking people down. This is not about looking back to belittle. This is about looking back to remember.
We’re not doing this to deconstruct the past. We’re doing this to preserve it. We’re doing this to say: Here is what was built. Here is what we made together. Here is the story of who we are.
It’s not always clean. It’s not always perfect. It’s not always comfortable.
But it’s ours.
You may be thinking: “I never made anything big. I didn’t design a game. I didn’t publish. I just ran a campaign for 30 years. Who would care about that?”
We do.
Your game notes. Your character sheets. Your worldbuilding notebook. The dungeon you made with colored pencils in junior high. The binder labeled “House Rules .” The jokes you still tell from a session no one else remembers.
That is the archive.
That is what future historians will want to study—not just what was published, but how it was played, what it meant to people, and how it felt.
And we need more than just the written record. We need the oral histories. The interviews. The longform conversations with people who were there at the beginning, and the ones who reshaped it later.
We need to ask questions. We need to listen. We need to record, transcribe, and save what we can, while we can.
Because the first generation—the ones who built this from scratch—are leaving us.
My generation—the ones who found it in the '80s, who scribbled on graph paper and shared photocopies—are still here. But not forever.
The generation that came of age in the '90s took those early games and said, “Let’s reinvent.” The 2000s said, “Let’s publish. Let’s share. Let’s make this weird, radical, honest.” The 2010s and beyond said, “Let’s own it. Let’s claim it. Let’s push it further than you thought we could.”
And what comes next?
We don’t know.
But whoever comes next will thank us if we give them a past to study. If we give them stories to read. If we leave the door open behind us.
This is not nostalgia. This is not sentiment.
This is stewardship.
This is about preserving what we’ve built—not as a monument, but as a trailhead.
Because the history of this hobby is not a timeline, it is a world.
One we built together.
One worth preserving.
So let’s preserve it.
Scan it. Record it. Write it down. Upload it. Name names. Tell stories. Tag your files. Share your links.
Donate to physical archives. Support Archive.org. Help preserve A&E. Record an interview. Save a forgotten zine. Dig through the old file cabinet and see what still lives there.
Because this hobby remembers.
Let’s make sure it still can.
For them. For us. For the ones who haven’t joined the table yet—but will.