Dungeons & Dragons co-creator and author (Ernest) Gary Gygax died 4 March 2008, aged 69. His wife, Gail, said he had been suffering from health problems for several years, including an abdominal aneurysm.
Gygax and Dave Arneson developed the game in 1974, though Gygax was the public face of it. If it D&D wasn’t the first, it was by far the most important of the early fantasy role-playing games, giving birth to an entire field. But it was the game’s second incarnation, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, with its growing series of hardcover rule books, adventure supplements, and the necessary dice (four-, six-, eight-, ten-, twelve-, and twenty-sided) that caught imaginations everywhere. Indeed, it spawned not only imitators and other paper-and-dice role-playing games, but also gave rise to text-based computer adventure games.
It is a tribute to Gygax’s impact through his creation how quickly obituaries and tributes to him have sprung up across the web. A sampling of them include:
This Los Angeles Times obituary
CNN published an obituary earlier today
This 2003 interview with Gygax, reposted on Boing Boing.
Wil Wheaton’s reminiscences of what D&D meant to him
Michael A. Burstein’s comments
Erik Mona of Lemuria Press’s write-up
The New York Times obituary
the British Independent‘s obituary
xkcd’s memorial comic
New York Times opinion piece by Adam Rogers, with flow chart
an interesting obituary in The Economist
My own memories have almost nothing to do with the man. I never got the chance to meet him, but his creation was definitely a part of my life. I lived in a brand new, and sparsely inhabited, neighborhood during my high school years. There was only one other fellow my age, and he taught me this interesting game, which didn’t have a board, but instead used graph paper and thick books with charts in them. It was fascinating, requiring great imagination, use of numbers and probability, and seemingly connected to lots of the books I’d been reading: it grabbed my interest instantly. And as other guys our age moved into the area, we introduced them to the game as well. I stopped playing when we went off to college, but my junior year, I happened to fall in with a group of like-minded people, and we played D&D one night a week, usually until dawn. It was a great release from the “stress” of being a student, to instead assume the persona of a wizard, or thief, or warrior, and do battle with incredible monsters and outsmart the Dungeon Master’s puzzles. I never caught the role-playing bug; D&D was the only game that grabbed and held my interest, and now it’s just a fond memory for me, but it was one of the things that made high school bearable. I’m sorry its creator is gone, but I know he’s left a wonderful legacy which won’t soon be forgotten.
Update 5 March: Having written all that, I’m embarrassed to note that I completely ignored Gygax’s career as a novelist. He wrote several dozen books, including one which we recently reviewed: The Anubis Murders. I guess my forgetfulness of this facet of his life is a tribute to the incredible impact he had as the creator of D&D.