Perhaps Gary will be best remembered for Dungeons and Dragons (1974). I fondly remember the colorful 1977 Monster Manual (1st Edition), I believe I may still have it in a box in the attic. I also can look to my bookshelves and see the first version of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), 1974 soft copy plus Greyhawk and Blackmoor supplements winking at me from behind a mountain of paper, "it has been a long time." Indeed.
How many other books do I still keep from the 1970's? You?
A story I like is from the Wikipedia: "The game Gettysburg from the Avalon Hill company captured Gygax's attention. It was from Avalon Hill that he ordered the first blank hexagon mapping sheets that were available. He began looking for innovative ways to generate random numbers, and used not only common dice (with six sides), but dice of all five platonic solid shapes."
A generation of kids learned probability from those dice, and a whole lot more.
This quote also illustrates how imagination and genres of game are cross-fertilized. A theme we've discussed many times on Terra Nova in the past is the legacy of table-top Role Playing Games (RPG) to modern video-game RPGs and indeed through MUDs to the massively-multiplayer MMORPGs. Yet, I think this technical lineage is too confining. Perhaps the clearer statement of legacy is from Anton I., from comment here:
May he rest in peace proudly as one of the very few people whose creations will outlive them.
Of not many people will this ever be said.
Yet, Gary sounded humbler than his legacy, "I would like the world to remember me as the guy who really enjoyed playing games and sharing his knowledge and his fun pastimes with everybody else."
Gamers everywhere, whatever your genre, salute. One of your kin has passed.
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