Dungeons & Dragons co-creator Gary Gygax - R.I.P.

Gary Gygax, age 69, it was announced today, has passed away. Arguably, GG along with his former business partner Dave Arneson, literally created the upsurge in fantasy interest among many of the collega-age crowd during my college years and even before that as it was in about 1970 or so that I remember purchasing the White Box set of D&D, not knowing that I needed a copy of the miniature rules titled "Chainmail" to PLAY the (*^#ed thing!

But it wasn't until about 1976, when I met Tom Smith (www.tomsmithonline.com) that I actually started playing RPG's. And working in the industry for a while - both on the retail side at Campus Bike & Toy in Ann Arbor and, later, as Manager of several of the Gamers Paradise stores in the Chicago area. And, indirectly, it was D&D that got Tom taken to his first science fiction convention by me... scary thought, to be honest... a game leads to a friendship, leads to a convention leads to Tom's career...

All because Gary Gygax wanted to put some rules to the child's game of "Let's Pretend."

Say what you want about him, but Gary Gygax was actually a major social influence in the latter part of the 20th century. He made role-playing games and, from them came a spreading interest in fantasy and science fiction and that led to a whole lot of other things... including a number of artist friends of mine making a living doing fantasy figures and artwork for novels that wouldn't even have existed if not for D&D and Gary and Dave.

Not to mention a certain GenCon show that Nanci and I did a few years ago... even though Gary had long since left the company and GenCon...