Gary Gygax
Ernest Gary Gygax [ gaɪ.gæks ] ( born July 27, 1938 in Chicago, Illinois, † March 4, 2008 in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin) was an American game designer and one of the inventors of the pen- and - paper role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons.
Life and work
Gary Gygax was the son of from Switzerland emigrated to America musician Martin Gygax, who played in the symphony orchestra of Chicago violin, and an American woman. Gygax was born in Chicago and grew up in Lake Geneva, where his family moved when he was eight years old. He went without graduating from high school, took various odd jobs, attended night school and heard anthropology at the University of Chicago. He earned his living as an insurance agent until his game systems were successful.
He and Jeff Perren invented the game Chainmail, from which in the late 1960s, then the medieval-like Dungeons & Dragons ( D & D short ) was developed. Gygax and Don Kaye founded their own game company, Tactical Studies Rules ( TSR ), which she published in 1974 the first version of D & D. Fell in 1975 Gygax an English magazine called Owl and Weasel in the hands. He took with the authors, including Ian Livingstone, contact and sent them a version of D & D. The English were immediately impressed and sold the game in England with enormous success. Gygax later developed a new version of D & D, which was published from 1977 to 1997 under the name of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.
Before D & D Gygax himself busy with his friend Dave Arneson with Wargaming ( "Chain Mail" ) - here battlefield scenarios were simulated with the plastic figures. Arneson came up with the idea to let the soldiers in a commando raid to take the castle, where they had to disarm traps and open doors. So got any players to identify with his warriors. The success was inevitable, and now all the worlds like Arnesons Blackmoor and Gygax ' World of Greyhawk emerged. Since Chainmail this was not mature, it has been expanded, and things like " hit points " were integrated. Initially it was given the title " The Fantasy Game". But the name was not catchy enough, and Gygax ' wife came to the name " Dungeons & Dragons ".
Another creation of Gygax was Dragon Chess, a three-dimensional fantasy variant of chess, which was published in August 1985 in issue 100 of the magazine Dragon. It is played on three different game boards of size 8 × 12, which are stacked upon each other. The upper board stands for the sky, the middle of the earth and the bottom of the underworld. The pieces are inspired by characters and monsters from the D & D series: King, Mage, Paladin, Cleric, Dragon, Griffin, Oliphant, Hero, Thief, Elemental, Basilisk, Unicorn, Dwarf, Sylph and Warrior.
After Gygax left TSR, he published Dangerous Journeys, an advanced role-playing game that combined several genres together. In 1995 he began work on a completely new role playing game that was originally designed as a computer game, but was then published under the name Lejendary Adventure 1999. It is sometimes regarded as his best work. He had it thrown on simple rules Particular attention because Gygax said that role-playing games with time have become too complex and thus discourage new players.
Gygax borrowed in the original English version of the animated series Futurama in the episode stories of interest I as well as in the animated film Futurama: Bender 's Game ( posthumously from archive footage) himself the voice. He also received a monument in a cemetery in the MMORPG implementation of " Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach ," in which he lends his voice to the game master in a dungeon. He died on 4 March 2008 at the age of 69 years to a heart attack at his home in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, where he still in January led D & D game rounds.
"I hope for the world I stay the guy who really loved games and made everyone to share his knowledge and his leisure. "