You will have already heard the sad news, but Gamesblog couldn't let it pass without a brief mention. Gary Gygax, who along with Dave Arneson, created the Dungeons & Dragons phenomenon, died yesterday at his home in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.
Launched in 1974, the original dice and paper fantasy adventure had a profound influence on videogames. Most obviously, the fathers of the Japanese RPG genre took the foundations laid down by Gygax - elements such as character customisation, inventories, turn-based combat and powering-up - and used them to craft series' like Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest and Legend of Zelda. In the States, software company Strategic Simulations Inc, bought out a range of D&D-inspired proto-RPG adventures during the early to mid-eighties, before purchasing the rights to AD&D in 1987 and developing a huge range of official tie-ins.
As for the MMORPG genre, which, with its elements of co-operation and human interaction, gets closest to the spirit of role playing as Gygax envisioned it, the influence of D&D is just as profound, from Ultima Online, all the way through to Everquest and of course, Dungeons and Dragons Online. There's a useful history of D&D inspired games and lots of other D&D stuff here.
Despite his undeniable influence, Gygax was ambivalent toward computer RPGs. Quoted in the New York Times, he said:
There is no intimacy; it's not live. It's being translated through a computer, and your imagination is not there the same way it is when you're actually together with a group of people. It reminds me of one time where I saw some children talking about whether they liked radio or television, and I asked one little boy why he preferred radio, and he said, 'Because the pictures are so much better.'
