Generations of quintessentially nerdy, magic-loving fan boys lost their leader Tuesday.
Gary Gygax, the co-creator of Dungeons &Dragons, inspired thousands in Snohomish County and around the world to roll the dice, battle legions of orcs in make-believe labyrinths and think about gaming in new ways.
He died Tuesday of an abdominal aneurysm at his home in Lake Geneva, Wis. He was 69.
“One of the things that Gary Gygax instituted was the ability to create different genres, different worlds and explore them,” said Joseph Elder, a Mountlake Terrace resident who plays Dungeons &Dragons. “He was one of the driving forces in getting gaming off the ground and legitimizing it. Now it’s big business.”
Gygax, a high school dropout who was fascinated by the Dark Ages, and Dave Aronson created the heroic quest game with $1,000 in capital in 1974. It inspired a $1.5 billion fantasy game industry.
Their game invited players to invent imaginary characters, such as dwarfs, elves, knights and wizards, and set off on adventures with a roll of a polyhedral dice. The game’s multiple rule books and character studies gave its obsessed fans thousands of pages of instructions to consider.
Scores of people in Snohomish County routinely gather together to dream up and map out fantastical Dungeons &Dragons stories.
Karen Mostella has been playing since her college days in the late 1970s. Her hobby morphed into a career for her, and she now owns Games Plus Too in Smokey Point. The store sells a host of gaming supplies, including Dungeons &Dragons figurines, books and die. It also plays host to weekly D&D games.
Mostella said because Gygax hadn’t been very active in gaming in recent years, her customers aren’t really mourning his death. However, his contribution to gaming is immense, she said. He helped people look beyond the board and into their imaginations.
“It changed the gaming industry,” said Mostella, who married a fellow gamer. “Dungeons &Dragons is the standard. It’s the benchmark most other games are based on. It’s a big deal whether your product is compatible with D&D or not.”
It took 11 months for Dungeons &Dragons to sell its first 1,000 copies, but the game took off and became a cultural phenomenon among college and high school males in the 1970s and 1980s. No publisher would touch the game when Gygax and Aronson were ready for market, so they assembled copies themselves. Sales were $8.5 million by 1980 and more than $14 million by 1981.
Other game designers began creating copycat versions; D&D eventually inspired a whole genre of computer games, influencing everything from interactive computer CD-ROMs to the card game, Magic: The Gathering.
“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.
Elder, a 33-year-old administrative assistant, oversees Dungeons &Dragons games at Edmonds Community College and is considering some sort of memorial to honor Gygax.
For Elder, the perfect Gygax tribute entails “a bunch of chubby guys with glasses sitting around the table, talking about girls.”
The Associated Press reports contributed to this story.
Reporter Kaitlin Manry: 425-339-3292 or kmanry@heraldnet.com.
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