Heaven Needed a new Dungeon Master
Ernest Gary Gygax
July 27, 1938 – March 4, 2008
E. Gary Gygax doing what he loved.
"Games give you a chance to excel, and if you're playing in good company you don't even mind if you lose because you had the enjoyment of the company during the course of the game." E. Gary Gygax
E. Gary Gygax; Co-Creator Of Dungeons & Dragons
By Patricia Sullivan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 5, 2008; B07
E. Gary Gygax, 69, who co-created the fantasy game Dungeons & Dragons and inspired the $1.5 billion fantasy game industry, died of an abdominal aneurysm March 4 at his home in Lake Geneva, Wis.
Mr. Gygax, a high school dropout who was fascinated by the Dark Ages, and Dave Aronson created the heroic quest game with $1,000 in capital in 1974. Their game invited players to invent imaginary characters, such as dwarfs, elves, knights and wizards, and set off on adventures with a roll of the polyhedral dice. The game's multiple rule books and character studies gave its obsessed fans thousands of pages of instructions to consider.
"I don't think I've really grokked it yet," Mike Mearls, the lead developer of the upcoming fourth edition of Dungeons & Dragons, told Wired blogger Lore Sjoberg, referring to Mr. Gygax's death. "He was like the cool uncle that every gamer had. He shaped an entire generation of gamers."
It took 11 months for Dungeons & Dragons to sell its first 1,000 copies, but the game took off and became a cultural phenomenon among college and high school males in the 1970s and 1980s. No publisher would touch the game when Mr. Gygax and Aronson were ready for market, so they assembled copies themselves. Sales were $8.5 million by 1980 and more than $14 million by 1981.
Other game designers began creating copycat versions; D&D eventually inspired a whole genre of computer games, influencing everything from immersive computer CD-ROMs to Magic: The Gathering.
"People said, 'What kind of game is this?' You don't play against anybody. Nobody wins. It doesn't end. This is craziness!'' Mr. Gygax told the New York Times in 1983.
He told Gamespy.com that games are "an interesting diversion from everyday life."
"Games give you a chance to excel, and if you're playing in good company you don't even mind if you lose because you had the enjoyment of the company during the course of the game," Mr. Gygax said.
Some parents and religious fundamentalists objected to the dark, magical nature of Dungeons & Dragons, and after two youngsters committed suicide while reportedly under its influence, Mr. Gygax found himself defending the game and the whole industry on "60 Minutes." The controversy passed, however. Within a few years, a D&D cartoon was created and broadcast on Saturday mornings.
Mr. Gygax lost control of the game in 1985, and his former company, TSR, sued him over his subsequent game, Dangerous Journeys. TSR eventually sold D&D to Wizards of the Coast, publisher of Magic: The Gathering. That company in turn sold it to Hasbro.
Mr. Gygax turned to writing fantasy novels, most of them based on game scenarios, including the Greyhawk series and, in collaboration with Flint Dille, the Sagard the Barbarian series. Mr. Gygax returned to writing role-play games in 1999 with Lejendary Adventure.
Mr. Gygax also founded the world's largest annual gaming convention, Gen Con, which started in 1968.
Ernest Gary Gygax was born in Chicago and moved to Lake Geneva at the age of 8. His father, a Swiss immigrant who played violin in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, read fantasy books to his only son and hooked him on the genre.
Although he dropped out of high school, Mr. Gygax took anthropology classes at the University of Chicago. He was working as an insurance underwriter in the 1960s when he began playing war-themed board games.
When the games got boring for him and his friends, Mr. Gygax added fantasy characters. That was such a hit that he published the innovations as the game Chainmail. To free up time to work on a game with more fantasy, he left the insurance business and became a shoe repairman.
His first marriage ended in divorce.
Survivors include his wife of 20 years, Gail Carpenter Gygax of Lake Geneva; two sons from his first marriage; and four children from his second marriage.
Dungeons & Dragons
Co-Creator Dies at 69
March 4, 2008, 3:39 PM EST
The Associated Press
MILWAUKEE -- Gary Gygax, who co-created the fantasy game Dungeons & Dragons and helped start the role-playing phenomenon, died Tuesday morning at his home in Lake Geneva. He was 69.
He had been suffering from health problems for several years, including an abdominal aneurysm, said his wife, Gail Gygax.
Gygax and Dave Arneson developed Dungeons & Dragons in 1974 using medieval characters and mythical creatures. The game known for its oddly shaped dice became a hit, particularly among teenage boys, and eventually was turned into video games, books and movies.
Gygax always enjoyed hearing from the game's legion of devoted fans, many of whom would stop by the family's home in Lake Geneva, about 55 miles southwest of Milwaukee, his wife said. Despite his declining health, he hosted weekly games of Dungeons & Dragons as recently as January, she said.
"It really meant a lot to him to hear from people from over the years about how he helped them become a doctor, a lawyer, a policeman, what he gave them," Gail Gygax said. "He really enjoyed that."
Dungeons & Dragons players create fictional characters and carry out their adventures with the help of complicated rules. The quintessential geek pastime, it spawned a wealth of copycat games and later inspired a whole genre of computer games that's still growing in popularity.
Born Ernest Gary Gygax, he grew up in Chicago and moved to Lake Geneva at the age of 8. Gygax's father, a Swiss immigrant who played violin in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, read fantasy books to his only son and hooked him on the genre, Gail Gygax said.
Gygax dropped out of high school but took anthropology classes at the University of Chicago for a while, she said. He was working as an insurance underwriter in the 1960s, when he began playing war-themed board games.
But Gygax wanted to create a game that involved more fantasy. To free up time to work on that, he left the insurance business and became a shoe repairman, she said.
Gygax also was a prolific writer and wrote dozens of fantasy books, including the Greyhawk series of adventure novels.
Gary Sandelin, 32, a Manhattan attorney, said his weekly Dungeons & Dragons game will be a bit sadder on Wednesday night because of Gygax's passing. The beauty of the game is that it's never quite the same, he said.
Funeral arrangements are pending. Besides his wife, Gygax is survived by six children.
Copyright 2008 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Farewell to the Dungeon Master
HOW D&D CREATOR GARY GYGAX CHANGED GEEKDOM FOREVER.
By Jonathan Rubin
Posted Thursday, March 6, 2008, at 12:17 PM ET
Gary Gygax was the salvation and curse of nerds worldwide. The co-founder of the Dungeons & Dragons franchise, who passed away on Tuesday at 69, created a form of fantasy escapism that you could share with others. D&D unified geeks, giving them accoutrements (multisided dice, colored figurines) and a language that bound them together. It was a secret club of sorts, a playground where social outcasts could be themselves and vent over life's frustrations. That wasn't always a good thing—playing Dungeons & Dragons didn't generally lead to activities like going outside or talking to girls. Still, a caffeine-fueled marathon D&D session was a place where your geeky tendencies were something to be celebrated rather than an affliction to be overcome.
Yes, we all knew, deep inside, that D&D wasn't cool. Being able to say, "I cast a Level 3 lightning bolt at the basilisk while averting my eyes so I don't turn to stone" doesn't have the social pull of "I know a guy who will buy us some alcohol." Even despite the social stigma, millions of people, me included, wouldn't have made it through adolescence without Dungeons & Dragons. A dedicated bookworm, I devoured D&D's rule books. It was more important for me to know how to repel the undead or make a flesh golem than to watch baseball or learn karate. Becoming a dungeon master, the equivalent of a Ph.D. in geekery, gave me a sense of mastery and accomplishment, not to mention my first real leadership experience.
Gygax thought a gaming experience wasn't complete without a good group of people to play with. He co-founded the International Federation of Wargamers in 1966. A year later, the first meeting of Gen Con—now a huge gaming convention—was held in his basement. In 1974, Gygax and his collaborator Dave Arneson published the Fantasy Game, later renamed Dungeons & Dragons.
The game Gygax created is easy to describe but difficult to imagine. My D&D pals and I basically sat around a table "role-playing"—i.e., pretending to be people with more interesting lives. Using dice and figurines, we brought to life the fictional characters we'd created on paper. Like life, Dungeons & Dragons doesn't have specific goals. The game never quite ends. Rather, you choose your path, grow, and suffer setbacks. Sometimes you have to start all over. Most of the game takes place in your head, with the dungeon master acting as referee and director. He sets the scene by describing what your character sees or, in the case of a spear thrust into your neck, feels.
The genius of D&D is the way it parcels out rules and fantasy. The game tethers the imagination just enough to keep you focused on an imaginary world (main goal: slaying nasty things for profit) without putting limits on what you could do inside that world. Dungeons & Dragons is like the greatest Etch A Sketch on earth: It gives you the tools to create whatever you want.
While D&D certainly encourages creativity, the ingredients Gygax conjured weren't exactly original. The game's stew of swords, sorcery, and mythological beasts was mostly appropriated from pulp writers and fantasy greats like H.P. Lovecraft and J.R.R. Tolkien. Gygax's skill in integrating fantasies, however, was unparalleled—the world of D&D may have medieval trappings, but its creatures were unbound by time or place. He took monsters from every culture and folklore, from the Greek Pegasus to the Japanese Kirin dragon to the Egyptian sphinx, and made them coexist in a single aggregate world.
Gygax was responsible for creating or adapting the game's spells, races, and character classes (cleric, fighter, etc.). Perhaps his essential contribution was to develop a way to translate physical characteristics into numbers. An American Gladiator, for example, might have a "strength" of 18, while a Woody Allen-like character might have a four. In combining math and fantasy, Gygax engineered a cocktail that no geek could resist. It was also his idea to create "levels" and "experience points," allowing a character to become more skilled as you spend more time with the game. This idea made the game impossibly addictive and helped yield $1 billion in worldwide sales (according to the BBC), scores of books, miniature sets, board games, a cartoon show, and a pretty crummy movie.
D&D fans were often super fans. Many painted their own figurines, went to conventions dressed up as orcs, or spent nights and weekends gaming. As opposed to other geeky addictions, though, this one was social (kind of). While it might have been socially detrimental to be known as the best dungeon master in all of middle school, it's also true that some people just don't fit in very well. D&D can provide a social outlet and a way to kick ass without being afraid of getting your ass kicked. Running a D&D campaign took a lot of paperwork, a lot of organization, and a lot of focus. I spent hours creating creatures, towns, and dungeons that that I didn't always end up using. I liked some of these scenarios so much I turned them into stories, and these experiences were one reason I decided to become a writer.
While Dungeons & Dragons has been a source of inspiration for innumerable people in the last three decades, none of Gygax's post-D&D projects proved particularly successful. Quarrels with staff led to his departure from his company, Tactical Studies Rules, in 1985. Both he and TSR failed to take the lead in the newest role-playing sensations, most notably video games (some of the D&D games did well, but Gygax's online RPG Lejendary Adventure Online never got off the ground) and collectible card games (TSR was eventually bought by Wizards of the Coast, owner of the mega-successful Magic: The Gathering franchise).
Some people have blamed Gygax's failings on the fact that he was always more gamer than businessman. He grew unhappy with later versions of D&D, declaring them "rule intensive" and more focused on singular achievements than group cooperation. Perhaps his purist belief in an anything-goes fantasy world became out of fashion in the greedy 1980s and disaffected 1990s. For whatever reason, people grew more interested in turning their characters into godlike beings and got less focused on the intricacies of team play. (Sort of like the NBA.)
Despite his late-career failings, Gygax's innovations have continued to spread. In creating the greatest nerd hobby of all time, he built the foundation of every future role-playing game. His idea to assign numbers for health, armor, stamina, and magic has also provided the backbone for innumerable video games, including the Final Fantasy series and the blockbuster World of Warcraft. Wherever geeks cluster, whether playing a Pokemon card game or a video game like Oblivion, they're playing by the rules that Gary Gygax laid out. It's fitting that through Gygax's creativity and inspired descendents, the realm of nerddom has found eternal life.
Post from a gaming forum
By Themoclaw
Suddenly, things didn't hurt so much. The pain was gone, and the darkness as well. The touch of his loved ones' hands faded away, as did the pain.
He was free.
He wasn't sure when it happened, just that it did. There was a burst of light, and a feeling of utter calmness, and then a moment of understanding.
He looked back only once, but already, what had been was fading away. A part of him longed to return, but a voice whispered to him that his time there was over. Something new lay ahead.
But first, there was something he wanted to do.
They were already waiting for him, smiling, just like he remembered. Sheets of paper with arcane symbols and numbers lay in front of them next to glasses of drink and small, polyhedral shapes that glowed in brilliant colors that no human eye could have seen. Faces long since missed. Friends and loved ones that he'd wished he could have seen one more time, and now he could.
There was one empty seat waiting for him at the head of the table.
He took his seat and cleared his throat. Reaching out a hand, he adjusted the shimmering cardboard screen and glanced over his notes.
"All right, guys. Roll for initiative," he said.
A note from the Bakersfield RPG Storyteller
Gary Gygax helped to shape my childhood through the game Dungeons and Dragons which he helped create. My first table top RPG experiance was, like many others, in a D&D game in the fourth grade. Today, a quarter of a century later, I still enjoy RPGs, old school D&D, and the newer CCGs. RPGs have helped hone my skills of creative thinking, teamwork, and writing. I thank Gary Gygax for helping in creating the sprigboard for all of this, D&D. Gary will be missed and his legacy will live on in the hearts of gamers everywhere. Anytime we pick up our dice we should say a silent prayer for Gary.
--Monty
Storyteller/Administrator
From www.penny-arcade.com