Gary Gygax

Ernest Gary Gygax ( GHY-gaks; July 27, 1938 – March 4, 2008) was an American game designer and author best known for co-creating the pioneering tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) with Dave Arneson.

In the 1960s, Gygax created an organization of wargaming clubs and founded the Gen Con tabletop game convention. In 1971, he co-developed Chainmail, a miniatures wargame based on medieval warfare with Jeff Perren. He co-founded the company TSR (originally Tactical Studies Rules) with childhood friend Don Kaye in 1973. The next year, TSR published D&D, created by Gygax and Arneson the year before. In 1976, he founded The Dragon, a magazine based around the new game. In 1977, he began developing a more comprehensive version of the game called Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. He designed numerous manuals for the game system, as well as several pre-packaged adventures called "modules" that gave a person running a D&D game (the "Dungeon Master") a rough script and ideas. In 1983, he worked to license the D&D product line into the successful D&D cartoon series.

Gygax left TSR in 1986 over conflicts with its new majority owner, but he continued to create role-playing game titles independently, beginning with the multi-genre Dangerous Journeys in 1992. He designed the Lejendary Adventure gaming system, released in 1999. In 2005, he was involved in the Castles & Crusades role-playing game, which was conceived as a hybrid between the third edition of D&D and the original version of the game.

In 2004, he had two strokes and narrowly avoided a subsequent heart attack; he was then diagnosed with an abdominal aortic aneurysm and died in March 2008 at age 69. Following Gygax's funeral, many mourners formed an impromptu game event which became known as Gary Con 0, and gamers celebrate in Lake Geneva each March with a large role-playing game convention in Gygax's honor.

Early life and inspiration

Gygax was born in Chicago, the son of Almina Emelie "Posey" Burdick and Swiss immigrant and former Chicago Symphony Orchestra violinist Ernst Gygax. He was named Ernest after his father, but was commonly known as Gary, the middle name given to him by his mother after the actor Gary Cooper. The family lived on Kenmore Avenue, close enough to Wrigley Field that he could hear the roar of the crowds watching the Chicago Cubs play. At age 7, he became a member of a small group of friends who called themselves the "Kenmore Pirates". In 1946, after the Kenmore Pirates were involved in a fracas with another gang of boys, his father decided to move the family to Posey's family home in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, where Posey's family had settled in the early 19th century, and where Gary's grandparents still lived.

In this new setting, Gygax soon made friends with several of his peers, including Don Kaye and Mary Jo Powell. During his childhood and teen years, he developed a love of games and an appreciation for fantasy and science fiction literature. When he was five, he played card games such as pinochle and then board games such as chess. At age ten, he and his friends played the sort of make-believe games that eventually came to be called "live action role-playing games", with one of them acting as referee. His father introduced him to science fiction and fantasy through pulp novels. His interest in games, combined with an appreciation of history, eventually led Gygax to begin playing miniature war games in 1953 with his best friend, Don Kaye. As teenagers, Gygax and Kaye designed their own miniatures rules for toy soldiers with a large collection of 54 mm and 70 mm figures, where they used "ladyfingers" (small firecrackers) to simulate explosions.

By his teens, Gygax had a voracious appetite for pulp fiction authors such as Robert E. Howard, Jack Vance, Fritz Leiber, H. P. Lovecraft, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. He was a mediocre student, and in 1956, a few months after his father died, he dropped out of high school in his junior year. He joined the Marines, but after being diagnosed with walking pneumonia, he received a medical discharge and moved back home with his mother. From there, he commuted to a job as a shipping clerk with Kemper Insurance Co. in Chicago. Shortly after his return, a friend introduced him to Avalon Hill's new wargame Gettysburg. Gygax was soon obsessed with the game, often playing marathon sessions once or more a week. It was also from Avalon Hill that he ordered the first blank hex mapping sheets available, which he then employed to design his own games.

About the same time that he discovered Gettysburg, his mother reintroduced him to Mary Jo Powell, who had left Lake Geneva as a child and just returned. Gygax was smitten with her and, after a short courtship, persuaded her to marry him, despite being only 19. This caused some friction with Kaye, who had also been wooing Mary Jo. Kaye refused to attend Gygax's wedding. Kaye and Gygax reconciled after the wedding.

The couple moved to Chicago where Gygax continued as a shipping clerk at Kemper Insurance. He found a job for Mary Jo there, but the company laid her off when she became pregnant with their first child. He also took anthropology classes at the University of Chicago.

Despite his commitments to his job, raising a family, and attending college, Gygax continued to play wargames. It reached the point that Mary Jo, pregnant with their second child, believed he was having an affair and confronted him in a friend's basement only to discover him and his friends sitting around a map-covered table.

In 1962, Gygax got a job as an insurance underwriter at Fireman's Fund Insurance Co. His family continued to grow, and after his third child was born, he decided to move his family back to Lake Geneva. Except for a few months he spent in Clinton, Wisconsin, after his divorce, and his time in Hollywood while he was the head of TSR's entertainment division, Lake Geneva was his home for the rest of his life.

By 1966, Gygax was active in the wargame hobby world and was writing many magazine articles on the subject. He learned about H. G. Wells's Little Wars book for play of military miniatures wargames and Fletcher Pratt's Naval Wargame book. Gygax later looked for innovative ways to generate random numbers, and used not only common six-sided dice, but dice of all five Platonic solid shapes, which he discovered in a school supply catalog.

Gygax cited as influences the fantasy and science fiction authors Robert E. Howard, L. Sprague de Camp, Jack Vance, Fletcher Pratt, Fritz Leiber, Poul Anderson, A. Merritt, and H. P. Lovecraft.

Wargames

In 1967, Gygax co-founded the International Federation of Wargamers (IFW) with Bill Speer and Scott Duncan. The IFW grew rapidly, particularly by assimilating several preexisting wargaming clubs, and aimed to promote interest in wargames of all periods. It provided a forum for wargamers via its newsletters and societies, which enabled them to form local groups and share rules. In 1967, Gygax organized a 20-person gaming meet in the basement of his home; this event was later called "Gen Con 0". In 1968, he rented Lake Geneva's vine-covered Horticultural Hall for $50 (equivalent to $460 in 2025) to hold the first Lake Geneva Convention, also known as the Gen Con gaming convention. Gen Con is now one of North America's largest annual hobby-game gatherings. Gygax met Dave Arneson, the future co-creator of D&D, at the second Gen Con in August 1969.

I'm very fond of the Medieval period, the Dark Ages in particular. We started playing in the period because I had found appropriate miniatures. I started devising rules where what the plastic figure was wearing was what he had. If he had a shield and no armor, then he just has a shield. Shields and half-armor = half-armor rules; full-armor figure = full armor rules. I did rules for weapons as well.

Together with Don Kaye, Mike Reese, and Leon Tucker, Gygax created a military miniatures society called Lake Geneva Tactical Studies Association (LGTSA) in 1970, with its first headquarters in Gygax's basement. Shortly thereafter in 1970, Gygax and Robert Kuntz founded the Castle & Crusade Society of the IFW.