I'm sure most of you already know this but the world lost gaming legend Gary Gygax yesterday. Fittingly, March 4th was also the day celebrated as GM's Day. The world of games, video games included, would not be what it is today had Gary Gygax not helped expand the niche historical miniature market into fantasy wargaming. From there his and Jeff Perren's fantasy wargame Chainmail developed into the pen and paper RPG known as Dungeons and Dragons. A lot of the earliest video games were made so people could try to play D&D on the computer. Don Daglow, president of Stormfront Studios, speaks of when he used his college mainframe to create DNGEON (because only six letter names were allowed) and other college systems who got it couldn't run it because of its massive 32k size. Just imagine western gaming without the influence of D&D to build upon and take a moment to thank Gary Gygax for his vision and hard work. Maybe roll up a character in his memory or play through an old adventure module. And remember that Gary Gygax isn't truly dead, he reached epic level and ascended to godhood.
3 comments:
As one post on this topic mentioned (can't remember the link), it's interesting when you consider the fact that a lot of basic video gaming tenants came from D&D. Specifically, one can argue that the idea of HP comes from D&D. Also, whether you like it or not, D&D did manage to solidify fantasy as a genre for gaming.
Gone but not forgotten, indeed. Gygax is responsible for what we're studying in this program in a very real and direct way. Modern gaming owes the man.
A sad day, but it's nice to see so many tributes popping up on so many sites - including this one :)
D&D -> DikuMUD -> EverQuest -> WoW
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