Gary Gygax

• 1. Introduction

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  Gary Gygax grew up close enough to Wrigley Field that he could hear the roar of the crowds from his bedroom window. That detail matters, because it tells you something about the world that shaped him: a world of crowd noise, neighborhood gangs, and the particular magic of games that bring strangers together. The boy who once played make-believe with his Lake Geneva friends would eventually create a game played by millions of people who had never met, in languages he could not speak, in countries he would never visit.

  Born in Chicago on the 27th of July, 1938, Ernest Gary Gygax died in March 2008 at age 69, leaving behind a body of work that stretched from medieval miniatures rules to a cartoon series watched by children who had never rolled a die. The questions worth asking about him are not simply what he made, but how he made it, what it cost him, and why, even after losing control of his most famous creation, he kept inventing.

• 2. Games as a Way of Life

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  At age seven, Gygax joined a group of neighborhood children who called themselves the "Kenmore Pirates". It was not a game so much as a way of organizing the world. When the Pirates got into a fracas with a rival gang, his father moved the family to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, a town where Gygax would spend most of the rest of his life.

  By age ten, he and his friends were playing the kind of make-believe games that would later be called live-action role-playing. One child always acted as referee. When he was in his teens, he and his best friend Don Kaye designed their own rules for toy soldiers, using 54mm and 70mm figures and small firecrackers they called "ladyfingers" to simulate explosions in the backyard.

  The pulp fiction authors he devoured as a teenager were not casual reading. Robert E. Howard, Jack Vance, Fritz Leiber, H. P. Lovecraft, and Edgar Rice Burroughs all shaped what kinds of monsters and magic would eventually appear in his games. When his mother reintroduced him to childhood friend Mary Jo Powell and he persuaded her to marry him at age 19, even his courtship unfolded in the register of someone who moved fast and committed hard. That quality would define his creative life for the next five decades.

• 3. From Cobbling to Chainmail

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  In October 1970, Gygax lost his insurance job after nearly nine years. He had five children and no steady income. He tried to make a living designing board games, but grossed only $882 in 1971. To keep the family fed, he began cobbling shoes in his basement, which gave him a reliable income and, crucially, more time to work on games.

  That same year, he published Chainmail with hobby-shop owner Jeff Perren, a miniatures wargame simulating medieval combat. The rules had originally appeared in the Castle and Crusade Society's fanzine The Domesday Book. For a small publisher like Guidon Games, it was a relative success, moving 100 copies a month. The game's fantasy supplement, drawing on J. R. R. Tolkien and other sources, introduced the element that would matter most to what came next: a system for warriors, wizards, and nonhuman monsters.

  In the winter of 1972-1973, Dave Arneson and David Megarry traveled to Lake Geneva to show Gygax their games. Gygax was already testing ideas on his two oldest children, Ernie and Elise, in a campaign he called "Greyhawk". What Arneson brought was a demonstration of role-playing that convinced Gygax he was looking at the future. The two immediately began collaborating on "The Fantasy Game", which would become Dungeons and Dragons.

• 4. Building TSR

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  Gygax left Guidon Games in 1973 and founded Tactical Studies Rules in October of that year with Don Kaye. Each partner invested $1,000; Kaye borrowed his share against his life insurance policy. The thousand-copy print run of the D&D boxed set was assembled by hand in Gygax's home. When printing costs rose from $2,000 to $2,500, the partners still lacked sufficient capital, so they brought in Brian Blume, who invested $2,000 to become an equal one-third partner.

  TSR released the first commercial version of D&D in January 1974. That first print run of 1,000 hand-assembled copies sold out in less than a year. In 2018, a first printing of that boxed set sold at auction for more than $20,000.

  The partnership's foundations cracked almost immediately. Don Kaye died unexpectedly of a heart attack in January 1975 at age 36. His will left everything to his wife Donna, who had no interest in the gaming business. Gygax's description of her was blunt: "After Don died she dumped all the Tactical Studies Rules materials off on my front porch." By July 1975, Gygax and Brian Blume had reorganized the company into TSR Hobbies, but a subsequent series of share purchases by the Blume family gradually reduced Gygax from majority shareholder to minority shareholder. He had, effectively, become an employee in the company he founded.

• 5. The Height and Cost of D&D

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  The Dragon debuted in June 1976. Gygax later reflected that when he renamed The Strategic Review and hired Tim Kask to edit the new periodical, he never anticipated "so great a success or so long a lifespan." Advanced Dungeons and Dragons followed in 1977, a completely new and more complex version of the game. Gygax refused to pay Arneson royalties on AD&D books, arguing the game was a new and different property. Arneson sued TSR in 1979; the settlement reached in March 1981 gave Arneson a 2.5-percent royalty on all AD&D products, which translated to a six-figure annual income for the next decade.

  D&D sales reached $8.5 million in 1980 and climbed to $16 million in 1982. That same year, Patricia Pulling's son killed himself, and Pulling blamed D&D for the death, forming an organization called B.A.D.D. to attack the game and TSR. Death threats arrived at the TSR office. Gygax hired a bodyguard. He defended the game on a segment of 60 Minutes that aired in 1985. The attacks did not suppress sales; in January 1983, The New York Times speculated that D&D might become "the great game of the 1980s" in the same manner that Monopoly was emblematic of the Great Depression.

  At TSR's peak, the company employed over 400 people in Lake Geneva, which a later mayoral proclamation noted was "over 6% of Lake Geneva's population at the time." Gygax's personal life during this period was disintegrating at roughly the same speed. He divorced Mary Jo in 1983 after years of estrangement, cocaine use, and extramarital affairs. The Blumes eventually shipped him to Hollywood to run TSR's entertainment division, where he co-produced a D&D cartoon series for CBS that led its time slot for two years.

• 6. Losing the Company

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  Gygax reached an agreement with Orson Welles in 1984 to star in a D&D movie, with John Boorman to direct. Almost simultaneously, word arrived that Kevin Blume was attempting to sell TSR for six million dollars. Gygax flew back to Lake Geneva and discovered that a company grossing $30 million was nonetheless $1.5 million in debt, kept afloat partly by questionable expenditures that included dredging a 19th-century shipwreck.

  He temporarily regained control and produced Unearthed Arcana and the novel Saga of Old City, both of which sold well. But the person he hired to stabilize TSR's management, Lorraine Williams, bought the Blumes' shares and replaced Gygax as president and CEO in October 1985. Several of his projects were immediately shelved. His legal challenge to block the share sale failed. He resigned from all positions at TSR in October 1986. By the terms of the settlement, he surrendered rights to almost everything except Gord the Rogue and characters whose names were anagrams of his own, such as Yrag and Zagyg.

  D&D sales in 1985 had reached $29 million. Gygax walked away with character names.

• 7. Starting Over, Repeatedly

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  New Infinities Productions launched in October 1986 after Gygax was approached by a wargaming acquaintance named Forrest Baker, who promised to raise one to two million dollars of outside investment and handle all business matters. Baker left before a single product shipped, when the promised investment failed to materialize. Gygax scrambled to publish his Gord the Rogue novels under a new licensing agreement with TSR for the Greyhawk setting; novel sales were brisk enough to keep the company alive.

  The science fiction RPG Cyborg Commando, released in 1987, was described years later by game historian Shannon Appelcline as "seen as one of the biggest flops in the industry." New Infinities dissolved in bankruptcy in 1989. Gygax's next venture, Dangerous Journeys, drew a lawsuit from TSR claiming the name and initials were too similar to Dungeons and Dragons. He renamed the game Dangerous Journeys; TSR then sued claiming the entire RPG was based on D&D. JVC and NEC, who had been developing a computer game around the setting, pulled out. By 1994 the legal costs had exhausted Gygax's resources, and he settled by selling TSR the complete rights to Dangerous Journeys and Mythus. TSR paid him for what he had built, then owned it.

  In 1986, his son Alex was born to Gail Carpenter, his former TSR assistant. Gygax married Carpenter on the 15th of August, 1987, the date that would have been his parents' 50th wedding anniversary. Biographer Michael Witwer observed that Alex's birth pushed Gygax to reckon with mistakes he had made as a father. The marriage lasted until his death.

• 8. The Final Work

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  By 2004, Gygax was trying to reconstruct Castle Greyhawk from 25-year-old sketchy maps and half-remembered session notes. He and Rob Kuntz had rarely kept comprehensive plans because they invented details on the spot. The dungeons had encompassed 50 levels of complex passages with thousands of rooms. Gygax planned to compress all of it into 13 levels across six volumes. In April 2004, he had a serious stroke, then another one a few weeks later. He returned to his keyboard after a seven-month convalescence, his output reduced from 14-hour workdays to one or two hours per day.

  That same year, he was diagnosed with an abdominal aortic aneurysm. Surgeons put the odds of surviving the operation at somewhere between 50 percent and 90 percent. Gygax refused surgery, believing he would likely die on the operating table. He switched from cigarettes, which he had smoked since high school, to cigars.

  Castle Zagyg Part I: Yggsburgh appeared in 2005, the first of the six planned volumes. In 2000, Gygax had voiced his cartoon self on the Futurama episode "Anthology of Interest I", appearing alongside Al Gore, Stephen Hawking, and Nichelle Nichols. He died in March 2008 before the dungeon volumes of Castle Zagyg could be written. At his funeral, mourners gathered at Lake Geneva's American Legion Hall to play games in his honor. His son Luke later organized that gathering into Gary Con, now an annual convention requiring a dozen Lake Geneva hotels to accommodate the demand. The event the mourners held on the day of the funeral is called Gary Con 0.