Creator of ‘Dungeons & Dragons’, the revolutionary fantasy board game

Gary Gygax, who died on 4 March, 2008, after several years of illness, was known around the world as the ‘Father of Role-Playing Games’.

His 1974 co-invention with Dave Arneson, Dungeons & Dragons, brought the fantasy world of wizards, warriors and monsters out of the pages of novels and into people’s homes for the first time.

The notoriously complex board game has an estimated 20 million players worldwide and earned Mr Gygax a share of $1 billion profits. He also invented a host of other games and penned a series of fantasy novels.

Ernest Gary Gygax was born on 27 July, 1938, to a Swiss immigrant and his American wife in Chicago, Illinois. From the age of five he was obsessed with card games and chess and his interest in fantasy and science fiction developed when he read the likes of Ray Bradbury, Robert E Howard, Fritz Leiber and L Sprague DeCamp.

He and his friends began playing war board games such as Gettysburg during their teens and by the late 1960s Gygax was hosting gaming meets in his basement at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. These were the origins of Gen Con, which is now the biggest gaming convention in America, attracting as many as 27,000 people.

In 1971 he and Jeff Perren invented a medieval miniatures game called Chainmail. In the following years, Gygax and Dave Arneson began combining the game’s rules with the imaginative role-playing of their childhoods, having the figures representing individual characters rather than units of troops.

Using their favourite authors’ works as inspiration, they developed the early ‘campaigns’ or adventures of Dungeons & Dragons, setting out characters and storylines in 16-page booklets for gamers to adapt existing games. As well as the traditional strategy of such games, players of D&D would also develop their characters through the system of ‘experience points’ which would provide new abilities, strengths and weaknesses.

J R R Tolkien’s influence on Dungeons & Dragons is often overstated. "I yawned through the books," Mr Gygax said. But the growing popularity of the Lord of the Rings saga played a part in popularising D&D after it was launched by Mr Gygax and Don Kaye’s Tactical Studies Rules Inc company in 1974. Conversely, D&D boosted sales of the writers whose ideas featured in the game, such as Jack Vance and Michael Moorcock.

Early print runs of the rule books sold out quickly in the war-gaming communities at colleges and schools and this original audience would remain at the core of D&D throughout its history. Mr Kaye died in 1976 and Mr Gygax became the sole owner of TSR, but financial difficulties forced him to sell two thirds of the business to Brian and Kevin Blume shortly afterwards.

Under the Blume brothers’ control the original concept was split into two entities, ‘Basic’ and ‘Advanced’ Dungeons & Dragons. The Basic game was designed to appeal to those unfamiliar with war-gaming, while Advanced expanded the original concept with more detailed rules.

In 1985 Mr Gygax left the company during an ongoing dispute with the Blumes over the firm’s management and a proposed D&D spin-off cartoon series. The row ended up in court with the judge ruling against Mr Gygax.

After leaving Tactical Studies Rules he began work on Dangerous Journeys for Game Designers’ Workshop which was published in 1992. The game was an attempt to address perceived flaws with the D&D system but lawsuits stopped production before Gygax could develop it beyond the original campaign book.

In 1999 Hekaforge Productions published Lejendary Adventure, originally developed by Mr Gygax as a computer game. The series, which ran to more than a dozen scenarios, boasted new innovations in character creation and was praised for its less weighty rules. Finally in 2004 he developed Castles & Crusades, a streamlined version of the original D&D concept.

His other work included writing columns for various gaming magazines, developing several conventional war games and the Greyhawk / Gord the Rogue series of novels and short stories which were based on an early D&D campaign. He also invented Dragon Chess, a 3D variant with fantasy characters operating over three boards representing the sky, ground and underworld.

Mr Gygax was immensely proud of Dungeons & Dragons, saying in a recent interview: "I had done something that so many people were having a great time with. I obviously love the game and I loved sharing with so many people. It’s a great sense of camaraderie."

When the game suffered a media backlash during the 1980s over accusations that it promoted the occult and had led to suicides, he remained steadfast in his belief that his creation had been a great social benefit to its players. He also insisted that the imagination required to play D&D gave it something its modern, computer-based equivalents could never offer.

Gary Gygax had five children by his first wife, Mary Jo, and two by his second, Gail. He suffered two strokes in 2004 and went into semi-retirement by Lake Geneva. He continued to be a regular guest at gaming conventions and was the Premiere Guest of Honour at the 40th anniversary Gen Con in 2007. He had recently suffered an aneurysm as a result of a mistake with his medication and died at home aged 69.

© Photograph copyright Alan De Smet