First things first, let's take a glance back at Weird Tales, the pulp magazine that featured the works of Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft. This magazine eventually laid the groundwork for the cultural exchange that influenced their respective tabletop games. While their concurrent publishing surely pitted them against each other to varying degrees, it also contributed to the reciprocal public reception of their novel depictions of the human condition, psyche, and the surreal, metaphysical underbelly of reality.
One could conclude that the Cthulhu Mythos and the subsequent Neo-noir, Art Deco and Gothic subcultures were erected upon the very site of the largely forgotten ruins of what Lovecraft and his contemporaries authored or cinematized all those years ago, alongside their fashion and architectural underpinnings. The brewing resurgence closely coincided with WW2 coming to a close and leaving its wake a hankering for cultural reawakening. Lovecraft, having passed on with his work still largely unknown to most, but the work preserved by some stubbornly dedicated enthusiasts, and most notably one by the name of August Derleth, who took it upon himself to promote Lovecraft's work, with most of his efforts concentrated in the immediate closing of the theater of war, through a collection of anthologies and continued post-war efforts.
After a decades-long lasting lull that surrounded Lovecraft's yet to take place fandom it became apparent that no other horror carried in it the essence of the ominous sanity stretching terror that our human psyche very much invokes in us regarding the things beyond our senses and as such the monsters and their makeups began losing their footing in the battlegrounds of the mad brains - as Lovecraft's necromantically reconjured body of work congrued within us yet again.
Moving to the modern era of Sandy Petersen's lineage of Mythos, the game designer of Call of Cthulhu who most certainly understood the principles behind the source material and had the design sensibilities to instill these ideas into carryable game plans that bore fruit in communicating these rather novel ideas through the medium of socially unconventional means of self-expression that only such theatrical mode of eloquence as tabletop roleplaying games could hope to summon forth—especially during its formative years, around that era of cooperative gaming in 1981, as Call of Cthulhu's newly found pages were revealed for the new era of fans in the form of its Basic Role-Playing manual[0], published by the house of Chaosium.
The book not only revived H.P. Lovecraft’s work but also placed it under the looking glass of rigorous scrutiny in studying cultural malleability and the maddening hunt in uncovering the sensical faculties of the forgotten one's works. Petersen’s game revitalized the role-playing genre with its way to powerfully evoke imagery that conjures and warps our very subrealities, revealing the hidden: that even in our most orderly and structured boasts, the cosmos remains inscrutable as it coasts.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_of_Cthulhu_(role-playing_...