Gary Gygax
| Gary Gygax | |
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Gygax at Gen Con Indy 2007
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| Born | Ernest Gary Gygax July 27, 1938 Chicago, Illinois, United States |
| Died | March 4, 2008 (aged 69) Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, United States |
| Nickname | "Father of role-playing games" |
| Occupation | Writer, game designer |
| Nationality | United States |
| Period | 1971–2008 |
| Genre | Role-playing games, fantasy, wargames |
| Spouse | Mary Jo Powell (m. 1958) Gail Carpenter (August 15, 1987 – his death) |
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Ernest Gary Gygax (/ˈɡaɪɡæks/ GY-gaks) (July 27, 1938 – March 4, 2008) was an American game designer and author best known for co-creating with Dave Arneson the pioneering role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). Gygax has been described as the father of D&D.
In the 1960s, Gygax created an organization of wargaming clubs and founded the Gen Con gaming convention. In 1971, he helped develop Chainmail, a miniatures wargame based on medieval warfare. He co-founded the company Tactical Studies Rules (TSR, Inc.) with childhood friend Don Kaye in 1973. The following year, he and Arneson created D&D, which expanded on Gygax's Chainmail and included elements of the fantasy stories he loved as a child. In the same year, he founded The Dragon, a magazine based around the new game. In 1977, Gygax began work on a more comprehensive version of the game, called Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Gygax 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 on how to run a particular gaming scenario. In 1983, he worked to license the D&D product line into the successful D&D cartoon series.
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