I wrote about THE CAMPAIGN back in 2014: that first long, magical AD&D run that still feels like the zenith of my gaming life. About how things changed afterwards as mirrored by Stranger Things and Growing Up in the 80s.
But there’s another piece of that story I’ve been turning over lately. It’s not just when it happened. It’s where.
Rochester, New York in the 1980s wasn’t New York City. It wasn’t the Twin Cities or Chicago. It was a mid-sized industrial city with big companies (Kodak, Xerox) that hadn’t yet collapsed, a couple of strong universities (U of R and RIT); and, for a brief, perfect window, a surprisingly deep hobby scene.
That location mattered more than I appreciated at the time.
The Narrow Window
I got my Moldvay Basic Set for Christmas 1982. I wasn’t in the absolute first wave of players, but I was close enough to catch the rising tide. By the time Warhammer Fantasy Battle 3rd edition arrived in my area in early 1988, my friends and I were right in the middle of high school, the perfect age for that kind of deep, obsessive hobby dive.
The window for pre-4th edition Warhammer in the US was tiny. Maybe three and a half years. GW’s management buyout in late 1991 was already pushing things toward 4th edition. We hit the sweet spot dead center.
Change any of those variables and the whole experience changes. Born a couple years earlier and it might have been too soon, the scene wasn’t there yet. Born later and we would have only known 4th edition and beyond. But my position in my generational cohort put me exactly where I needed to be.
Why Rochester Mattered
Not every town had this. Places like say Kansas or smaller rural areas often had one (maybe) game store, if they were lucky. Rochester had 3–5 active stores at points in the late ’80s. The industrial base that hadn’t yet hollowed out, plus the colleges, created enough of a critical mass of nerds, engineers, and creative types to sustain a real hobby infrastructure.
It wasn’t a huge leap from Lake Geneva for TSR stuff, and the Games Workshop distribution pipeline reached us reasonably well in those early days. That combination: decent distribution + local density, was rarer than it felt at the time. We just didn't know it.
By the mid-’90s the scene had contracted. Crazy Egor’s (I actually know Egor/Paul; he lived my home town) became Millennium Games. A couple of other stores hung on for a time, but for a stretch it was spotty. The golden window had closed.
The Ghost of Place
Rereading my earlier posts about THE CAMPAIGN and the Citadel Giant saga, I keep coming back to how much location shaped what we got to experience. The same way the show Stranger Things uses Hawkins as more than just a backdrop, it’s part of the feeling; Rochester was part of ours.
We didn’t have the monster-of-the-week drama. We had basement tables, multiple stores to browse on weekends, friends who were all hitting that same perfect age at the same time, and a brief era when Warhammer 3rd edition felt like the center of the universe.
It wasn’t perfect. It was rough around the edges, like most real memories. But it was ours.
And like the friendships that formed around those tables, some of it faded as people moved on with life. But the place where it happened? That still feels special. I ended up back in my hometown, the same place where so much of it started. The man cave is here. The dogs are here. The memories are here.
Sometimes the luck isn’t just in the timing. It’s in the coordinates.
The Ghost of the ’80s didn’t just haunt the games we played. It haunted the town where we played them.
How about you? If you are around my age (smack dab in the middle of Gen X) does this sound familiar?
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