Avalon Hill, which founded the modern wargaming hobby and published the General, had been watching others put on gaming conventions promoted through the pages of their magazine for several years before they decided to host the first Origins.  At the time, the gaming club Interest Group Baltimore was hosting game play sessions at the Avalon Hill offices.  Some of the club members, such as Paul O’Neil and Neil Topolnicki, began to talk to Avalon Hill staff member Don Greenwood about how a convention might be possible there in Baltimore. From there, Greenwood spoke with co-workers at Avalon Hill, like vice president Thomas Shaw, and was able to convince others in the company that hosting their own convention had merit.  Work began, leveraging members of Interest Group Baltimore who put in over 1,000 hours for much of the labor to prepare for and put on the convention, and Origins I was hosted July 25-27 at John Hopkins, a private university in Baltimore.

The first Origins was focused on providing a venue for board wargaming tournaments.  There may have been some discord at Avalon Hill over the decline of board wargaming at other large conventions, namely Gen Con, and this could have been an effort to reassert the place of board wargaming in the hobby world.  The name “Origins” was chosen because Don Greenwood felt that Baltimore, the home of Avalon Hill, was the origin of the gaming hobby.  The convention was touted as having 90% of the who’s who in board wargaming competing in 16 different tournaments.  Attendees clashed in highly competitive matches for games such as Afrika Korps, War in the East, and Panzer Leader.  Though board wargames were the focus of the convention, they were not the only games there.  Diplomacy, which was popular at gaming conventions and often difficult to play at home due to it needing 7 players, held a 49 person tournament.  The non-wargame Football Strategy was also present, as well as a selection of miniatures based games.  It was also impossible to keep the new fad, Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), completely at bay at Origins.  As Tim Kask of TSR recently claimed, “they did not want us there, but we went anyway.” The way D&D was described in the convention’s program highlights what the showrunners thought of it at the time:

“Here we have less of a game than a trip into one’s own vivid imagination as a gamesmaster describes the horrors that await the participants as they venture into his subterranean castle.  Little skill other than familiarity with the percentages is involved here, but advocates of this growing pastime swear by it over all other forms of gaming.”

By the time the dice and cardboard chits stopped moving at 5pm on Sunday Origins was a success.  Not only was there plenty of gaming to be had, but the first Origins Awards were handed out.  The award was created to recognize excellence in game design, and increase awareness and sales for the nominees, winners, the Origins convention, and hobby games in general.  It began what has been the most prestigious award for hobby games given in the United States.  Over 1,500 people and 25 vendors were reported as having attended the convention, significantly more than the roughly 1,000 people that attended Gen Con that same year.  Despite the success, Avalon Hill did not desire to host another show.  Running this convention took up more time and finances than the company would have liked, and they rather envisioned that another company would take the reins and host Origins II somewhere else as their own burden.  Importantly, they also wanted to see the show rotate around to other parts of the country so the national convention could, in a way, be local to all.  Though this was their desire, it would not come to be for Origins II which Avalon Hill would again host in Baltimore.