Dungeons & Dragons creator Gary Gygax dies
Agence France-Presse
CHICAGO - Gary Gygax, co-creator of the iconic Dungeons & Dragons fantasy game and considered the father of modern role-playing gaming, died in his home Tuesday, his wife said.
Gygax had been suffering from a number of health problems including an incurable heart aneurism, Gail Gygax said. He was 69.
First published in 1974, the Dungeons & Dragons game, in which players create magical and heroic characters and guide them through a series of adventures, soon became a cultural phenomenon.
There was no game board in this interactive, imaginative adventure: just paper, pen, the dungeon master's rule book and a set of multisided dice.
D&D spawned a booming industry and has inspired a generation of writers, video game designers and filmmakers.
Gygax's cult hero status among self-proclaimed geeks is so intense that one fan even named a strain of bacteria after him.
But he faced intense criticism in the 1980s when the game became a target for cultural conservatives who blamed it for causing teen suicides, murder and devil worship.
"That really pushed the sales up," Gygax joked in an interview with GameSpy.
"What bothered me is that I was getting death threats, telephone calls, and letters. I was a little nervous. I had a bodyguard for a while.
"I'm glad that most people have been able to separate the fantasy of the game from the reality of real life - games have nothing to do with real life. There are no real dragons, there's no real magic, no real magic swords, and certainly no real treasure... or I would have retired at home by now."
The popularity of Dungeons and Dragons faded in the 1990s as the video games boom began, but Gygax's influence in the gaming world continued through his columns and the more than 80 games, game products, and books he created.
A voracious reader with an unfettered imagination, Gygax worked intensely until his health deteriorated in 2004.
"He would be in a daze," Gail Gygax said. "Especially when he was creating a new world. One time he was painting a globe for two weeks."
She said that while he used computers to help speed up the designs for his games and the writing of his books, he never really got interested in video games.
"He liked the group environment where you were with people," she said.
"He played all kinds of games ... we would have a game of cribbage on our front porch every night in the summer."
Originally printed here
Before there were computer games, there was D&D. I recall the days where my friends and I would sit around a table and play this, armed with well-worn copies of rulebooks, our own sets of dice (which were variably blessed one way or another), and sheets of paper scribbled with stats, and maps.
While we created the adventure, Gary Gygax created the world we 'lived' in. It provided us with the first real form of escapism. In fact, looking at it, it was the epitome of the ultimate PvE MMORPG. There were no scripted encounters. There was no farming of content. Every time we sat down, we had Heroic encounters which required imagination, (and sometimes luck) to clear. There were no crib sheets, no uber raiding guild to work out the strategies, and in the end, what we did affected the world we were in. When we killed the Dragon, it stayed dead. We were heroes. (& of course, we had a great Dungeon Master).
While it was scorned as a pastime of geeks or even demonic or satanic worship, but more than anything, it taught us important life lessons as the need to work as a team to achieve goals. It taught us leadership qualities. It taught us that our actions have consequences that we needed to deal with and in the end, it really did teach us to be better people.
All this was possible through the imagination of Gary Gygax. I've read a number of his columns, and played some of his other games. While none had the lasting prowess of D&D, they were all fun and one of their kind. He has always professed to have no interest in video games, and I think that was a loss to this industry. Imagine if the D&D MMORPG had his guidance. I believe that would have been something that would have challenged the supremecy of WoW.
As one who still take intense pleasure from this genre, I mourn his passing. We had lost a true visionary.
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