Gary Gygax

Ernest Gary Gygax (Chicago, 1938 – Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, 2008) was an American game designer and writer, often regarded as the father of role-playing games. The son of a Swiss immigrant, he grew up in Lake Geneva, where a childhood fondness for chess, card games and pulp fiction of adventure and science fiction gradually became a lifelong vocation. His name is inseparable from Dungeons & Dragons, the game that transformed the way many people think about tabletop leisure.

In the 1950s and 1960s he became hooked on miniature wargames, especially Avalon Hill's Gettysburg. While working as an insurance clerk, he helped organize wargaming clubs and in 1967 hosted a gathering in his basement that later became known as Gen Con 0, a precursor of the Gen Con convention. In 1971 he wrote Chainmail with Jeff Perren, a miniatures game on medieval combat that included a fantasy supplement. From there, working with Dave Arneson and with Don Kaye as a partner, he developed Dungeons & Dragons, published in 1974 by TSR, the company they founded. A more comprehensive version, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, followed in the late 1970s.

Gygax left TSR in the mid-1980s after disputes with its management. He went on to create independent games, among them Dangerous Journeys, and in 1999 released Lejendary Adventure, a system he designed to be as simple as possible because he felt that role-playing rules had become too complicated for newcomers. In 2005 he was involved in Castles & Crusades. He suffered heart attacks in 2004 and died at his home in Lake Geneva in 2008. His legacy lives on in tabletop role-playing and in much of the role-playing video game tradition, and each March Lake Geneva holds a convention in his honour.