Gary Gygax

Ernest Gary Gygax (July 27, 1938 – March 4, 2008) was an American game designer, author, and entrepreneur who, with David Arneson, created the first fantasy role-playing game, Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), in 1974.¹⁴¹¹ His work gave rise to an entire tabletop industry and is widely credited as a foundational influence on modern electronic role-playing games.¹⁴¹⁶

Gygax was born in Chicago, the son of Ernest and Almina Burdick Gygax.⁹ His father, a Swiss immigrant who played violin in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, read fantasy books to his only son and instilled in him a lifelong love of the genre.¹¹⁷ In 1946, at the age of eight, Gygax moved with his parents to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin?, the town where he would live for the rest of his life.⁹⁷ A keen game-player from an early age — devoted to card games and chess as a child — he dropped out of high school but briefly took anthropology classes at the University of Chicago, and worked as an insurance underwriter through the 1960s.¹³⁷ He began playing cards and chess at the age of five, and by January 1974, at age thirty-five, he and a group of friends were sitting down in a Lake Geneva basement with the first edition of the game they had invented.¹⁰

In the late 1960s Gygax belonged to a group of Wisconsin wargamers who called themselves the Lake Geneva Tactical Studies Association.¹³ An avid fan of traditional board-based war games, particularly medieval battles, he grew restless with their dry realism and began introducing fantasy elements drawn from the pulp authors he devoured.⁷ The wargaming tradition he worked within descended from Kriegsspiel, a military training exercise devised by a nineteenth-century Prussian officer, and Gygax cut his teeth on commercial titles such as Gettysburg.¹⁰¹⁸ “The guys were getting a little tired of military miniatures, so one day I put a troll under the bridge, had a giant dragon and all that kind of good stuff,” he recalled in 1987; “they absolutely went crazy for it”.⁷ He framed the leap plainly: “Why not have one figure represent a wizard who could cast a fireball?” ¹⁰

These innovations evolved into Chainmail, a fantasy war game still played with miniature pieces, which Gygax introduced in 1971 and co-developed with Jeff Perren.⁷¹⁴¹³ In a supplement to Chainmail, Gygax laid down the seeds of a game using fantasy creatures such as elves and orcs, drawing on the heroic fantasy of American writers Howard?, Leiber?, and Jack Vance, with indirect influence from J. R. R. Tolkien‘s Lord of the Rings trilogy.¹³¹⁶ Arneson stripped this down into a game in which each player was represented by a single piece, and the two then codified it into an early version of Dungeons & Dragons.⁷²³

The resulting game did away with the board, relying only on graph paper, pencils, imagination, and many-sided dice.⁷ Each player created a persona from a class — such as warrior or wizard — and a race — dwarf, elf, goblin — and set off on a fantasy expedition guided by a player called the Dungeon Master.⁷¹⁶ The goals included finding a hoard of treasure or defeating an evil magus, and games could last several days with no obvious way to win.⁷ “People said, ‘What kind of game is this?’ You don’t play against anybody. Nobody wins. It doesn’t end. This is craziness,’” Gygax told the New York Times in 1983.¹¹⁷ Originally titled “The Fantasy Game,” it was renamed Dungeons & Dragons at the suggestion of Gygax’s wife.¹⁰¹

In 1973 Gygax and his boyhood friend Donald Kaye founded Tactical Studies Rules (TSR) to develop and market the game.⁷¹⁴¹³ Dungeons & Dragons reached the shelves in early 1974; no publisher would take it, so Gygax and his collaborators assembled the copies themselves.⁷¹¹ It took eleven months to sell its first 1,000 copies, but the game gradually became an underground hit among college and high-school players in the 1970s and 1980s.¹¹¹⁶ The audience moved in an unusual direction: it began with the college-age group and worked its way down into high schools and junior high schools as older siblings carried the game home.¹⁶ Sales reached $8.5 million by 1980 and rose further over the following years.⁷¹¹

Gygax assumed control of TSR when Kaye died in 1976, but overextended his finances buying out shares and was forced to sell a majority holding to Brian Blume, whose father provided the financing.¹³ The company, incorporated as TSR Hobbies, Inc., then released Gygax’s revised and expanded version of the game, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, marketed from 1977 to 1979 and regarded as the definitive version.¹³⁷ It was this edition whose gaming manuals were supplemented by — or hybridized with — illustrative novels, and TSR went on to publish hundreds of works of fantasy and science fiction; its acquisitions included the pioneering science-fiction magazine Amazing Stories.¹³¹⁵

The game’s dark and magical themes drew the suspicion of some parents and religious groups, who accused it of fostering satanic cults and linked it to teen suicides; Gygax received death threats and for a time employed bodyguards, while always insisting the claims were absurd and that the game aided imaginative development.⁷¹¹ He defended the game and the wider industry on 60 Minutes, and reportedly offered a million-dollar reward to anyone who could make one of his rulebooks scream when burned.¹¹¹⁸ The controversy passed, and in 1983 a Dungeons & Dragons animated television series, which Gygax helped produce, debuted and led its time slot.¹¹⁴¹⁹ That same year he set up the Dungeons & Dragons Entertainment Corporation in California to manage the brand’s expansion into other media.¹³

Gygax lost control of TSR amid a legal and financial struggle, selling his shares and leaving the company in the mid-1980s.⁷¹³ The first of his game-based heroic fantasy novels, Saga of Old City in the Greyhawk series, appeared around this time; he subsequently developed a new role-playing game, Dangerous Journeys, through Game Designers’ Workshop, which TSR sued over and eventually took over, though he was allowed to keep marketing novels built on its scenarios.¹³¹¹ TSR was acquired in 1997 by Wizards of the Coast, publisher of Magic: The Gathering, which was later acquired by Hasbro.¹⁶¹

Gygax founded what became the largest annual tabletop gaming convention in North America, naming it Gen Con after Lake Geneva and running the first one at Horticultural Hall in his hometown in 1968.¹¹¹⁵ The convention outgrew the town, moving to the American Legion Hall and then to the Lake Geneva Playboy Club in 1977 before relocating entirely; it now draws tens of thousands of gamers each year.¹⁵ In his later years he wrote further role-playing games and novels, intending a mid-1990s game for the burgeoning market of computer multi-user dungeons; that market having largely been lost to titles such as EverQuest, the game was instead launched in conventional format as Lejendary Adventures in 1999.¹³ He never fully embraced the migration of role-playing to computers, telling an interviewer that an online game lacked the intimacy of a live gathering: “your imagination is not there the same way it is when you’re actually together with a group of people”.¹⁶

Gygax was forced into semi-retirement after suffering a stroke on May 4, 2004.¹³¹⁰ He died of an abdominal aneurysm at his home in Lake Geneva on March 4, 2008, at the age of 69.¹¹¹⁶ He was survived by his wife of twenty years, Gail Carpenter Gygax, and six children.¹¹¹⁶ His cultural reach extended well beyond gaming; he voiced himself in two episodes of Futurama, and an estimated twenty million people are thought to have played the game he helped create.¹⁰¹⁹¹⁶ Through Dungeons & Dragons, Gygax forged a bridge between the noninteractive worlds of books and films and the interactive video-game industry that followed, carrying its fantasy tropes — elves, dwarves, dragons, character classes, and the rolling of polyhedral dice — into the role-playing video games that succeeded it.¹⁶¹⁴