R.I.P. Gary
E. Gary Gygax passed away last night. He was one of the founding fathers of role-playing games. While he may not have been the principle creator of Dungeons & Dragons, he was certainly the one responsible for popularizing it, the genre, and the industry. If you play role-playing games, even if you sneer at the quaintness of the original systems, you still owe a debt to the guy. This was how it all started. Without it, there may not have been Final Fantasy, World of Warcraft, Ultima (which began life as a high school project entitled, "D&D"), Oblivion, or Fallout. At least not in a form we'd recognize.

I think I only exchanged a couple of forum posts with him, and shared a couple of "credits" blurbs with him that were probably beneath his notice. I never met him face-to-face. Hardly worth noting in a Kevin-Bacon-esque degree of separation game. I didn't agree with many of his views (hey, I LOVED 3rd edition Dungeons & Dragons, and computer RPGs... ).

But Gary Gygax was a powerful influence on my life. The day I discovered the game that turned imagination into a playing field, my life changed. Not all of it was positive, but here I am, twenty-seven years later, and I'm still playing RPGs, still using words I learned from his books like "dweomer" and "evocation" and "melee." Many of my closest friends I met - at least indirectly - because of RPGs. My industry owes a lot to what he did. While it wasn't responsible for my meeting the lady who'd later become my wife, it was a topic of conversation and an activity we shared in college.

So long Gary, and thanks for the good times!

Labels: Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 4:57 PM (Permalink)