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RIP Gary Gygax
I am completely devastated right now. No sooner did I make the post about GM’s day when I spotted the story on ENWorld. Up until the end he was posting on message boards and talking to his fans. He touched the lives of so many, including my own, and I am so sad right now that he’s gone. I was really looking forward to seeing him again at GenCon, and I’m very upset he won’t be with us anymore.
D&D co-creator Gary Gygax passes away
Beginning his career in the 1960s, Gygax wrote and had published more than 80 games, game products, and books. He founded the Gen Con
gaming convention, which began as a gathering of wargames enthusiasts at the Gygax home in 1967, and co-founded games publisher TSR, Inc. (originally Tactical Studies Rules) in 1973.
Often known as the "father of role-playing," Gygax co-created the Chainmail miniatures rules which led to the development of Dungeons & Dragons. He also wrote or co-wrote, among many other games and game supplements, the World of Greyhawk fantasy campaign setting, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Gamma World, Boot Hill and other role-playing games. He authored several novels and was the co-producer of the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon show for television.
Good Bye, Uncle Gary
I still haven't fully wrapped my head around the passing of Gary Gygax. It's impossible to overestimate the influence his work had on games and, by osmosis, our culture. Tonight millions of people will log on to WoW, sit down at tables for a game of D&D or Magic, or put paint to metal on a Warhammer or Warmachine army, all because of EGG and the other trail blazers of his era.
Gary was like the cool gaming uncle to an entire generation. He told us about the fantasy and SF series we should be reading via his recommended book lists in the DMG. He told stories of his campaigns in the DMG and Dragon magazine, giving the game a sense of life that was a little hard to find when you were one of three gamers in a tiny New Hampshire town. He was an icon, the Godfather of Gaming, the first and original gamer.
He'll be missed.
Gary Gygax, RIP
But aside from the immense, irreducible professional debt I owe him, I also (and perhaps more importantly) owe him a huge amount of great, good fun. Not just in his co-invention of a game form and a hobby that has consumed thousands of delighted hours of my time, but in the exuberance of his ideas, expressed through his own inimitable vocatory blend of pastiche, pedantry, and pomp. For all that I point to Avram Davidson as my cynosure, it was Gary Gygax (along with his cousin of the soul, Robert E. Howard) who first showed me what you could do by putting history in a Really Big Waring Blender -- or perhaps a Waring-Waring-Cuisinart-Guisarme -- and setting it to "color."
A large part of my childhood and adulthood has been influenced by him and his creation. A perfect quote from Gary Gygax posted by Mike Mearls:
"These rules are strictly fantasy. Those wargamers who lack imagination, those who don't care for Burroughs' Martian adventures where John Carter is groping through black pits, who feel no thrill upon reading Howard's Conan saga, who do not enjoy the de Camp & Pratt fantasies or Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and Gray Mouser pitting their swords against evil sorceries will not be likely to find DUNGEONS and DRAGONS to their taste. But those whose imaginations know no bounds will find that these rules are the answer to their prayers. With this last bit of advice we invite you to read on and enjoy a "world" where the fantastic is fact and magic really works!"
E. Gary Gygax, 1 November 1973
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