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Comment by protomyth | Hacker News Reader

D&D was an amazing game. My younger brother went form Dr. Seuss to the AD&D Players Handbook in his reading progression just so he could play with us. I'm pretty sure his speed math is a result of this era.

I got a copy of Gygax magazine recently and all the fun memories came flooding back. I made life-long friends and thought about things I never would have due to D&D and its decedents.

On the darker side of humanity, D&D also gives a bit of a current lesson to techies in the valley. It is very easy to demonize a group and make quite a bit of cash off it. If you didn't head the lessons of the Tea Party and Occupy, then maybe looking at D&D wouldn't hurt.

"So, what do you do?"

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Hi, I'm the guy behind Gygax magazine. It really made my day to see your comment. Thanks.

Since I decided to visit the site based on your comment, I figure you might want to look at optimizing the image on the front page - it's a ~670k PNG that took 12 seconds to download...

Thanks for the tip. We just had that up quickly for an event, I've put a more optimized image on the front page now.

Well, amazing job of capturing the early experience in one magazine. It felt like an old Dragon or even a Byte magazine because I looked at every ad. It still amazes me how the ads in some magazines with amazing articles are welcome and the web still hasn't gotten it right.

You just named two of my favorite magazines growing up. I used to send in those "reply cards" that Byte magazine had, and I'd actually go through and circle all the numbers for ads on the card that I was interested in.

I think ads work in magazines like that because they're for audiences with specialized interests, and because a magazine ad isn't as intrusive, and hopefully doesn't get in the way of reading.

We do a PDF version of the magazine as well, but I'm trying to think about what else we can do to keep it relevant for people that don't read those formats.

In those days, the ads were an integral part of the experience and actually _added_ to the value of the magazines. I was also an avid reader of "Byte" and "Dragon". I have several years' worth of Dragons from the 1980s, and was lucky enough to score a copy of the CD compendium during the short window it was available... and of course old issue of "Byte" magazine can be found on archive.org.

And of course, both magazines featured wonderful cover art. "Dragon" had a huge variety of artists and featured some really unforgettable pieces and Byte often featured Robert Tinney who perfectly captured the zeitgeist of the computer revolution with his simple, clean, but imaginative artwork.

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