Gary Gygax

Ernest Gary Gygax (1938–2008) was born in Chicago to a Swiss father and an American mother. As a teenager he developed the range of interests that would directly shape his later career: card and board games, history, fantasy and science-fiction literature, and miniature wargames.

After a brief spell in the U.S. Marines, he found work as a shipping clerk, spending his long train commute reading voraciously and corresponding with other wargames enthusiasts. By his early twenties he was married with children, and the basement of his family home in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, became an important meeting place for local gamers. In 1969 he met Dave Arneson, a University of Minnesota student whose fantasy campaign Blackmoor developed from the Napoleonic-era games pioneered by David Wesely.

Combining Arneson’s experiments in character-led campaign play with Gygax’s medieval miniatures rules, Chainmail, the two developed Dungeons & Dragons, the first published tabletop role-playing game. Gygax went on to co-found TSR to produce and distribute the game, which by the 1980s had become an international phenomenon.

His relationship with the business side of the hobby he helped create was often fraught and occasionally controversial, but by the time of his death in 2008 he was widely celebrated as a pop-cultural figure whose innovations had shaped a great swathe of tabletop and video-gaming culture.

Image: Cover of Dungeons & Dragons Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns (1975) ©Wizards of the Coast LLC. Permitted under the Fan Content Policy. Image courtesy of Ex Carta