Gygax, Ernest Gary

▪ 2009

      American inventor

born July 27, 1938, Chicago, Ill.

died March 4, 2008, Lake Geneva, Wis.

helped create (1974) the world's first role-playing fantasy game, Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), and ultimately paved the way for modern interactive video games online. The game's soaring popularity led to D&D-themed video games, movies, and books, with sales reaching $29 million by 1985. The radical game used pencils and graph paper instead of a board, along with polygonic dice, and a Dungeon Master led players on their own imagined medieval fantasy adventures featuring a myriad of mythical beings and creatures. In 1971 Gygax introduced the game Chainmail, the predecessor of D&D, and in 1973 he cofounded the company Tactical Studies Rules (TSR), which produced the first edition of D&D the following year. After leaving TSR in 1985, Gygax continued to develop new fantasy games and novels.

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