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Gary Gygax passed away.
17 years ago
Gary Gygax passed away today.
A complicated character who co-authored the original TSR Dungeons and Dragons, an outgrowth of the miniatures game Chainmail.
Criticisms aside, and there are quite a few, Mr. Gygax has had an indirect effect, I'd say, on just about everyone's lives who plays videogames, looks at furry art, mucks, or has seen a fantasy film on the big screen.
It was his grab-bag of everyone else's concepts of fantasy, Isaac Asimov, Tolkein, Lovecraft, Fritz Lieber, et al, that got chucked into the idea of Roleplaying as a passtime outside the field of acting before an audience. You hung out with a few friends (parent's basement and Mtn. Dew jokes aside), and immersed yourself in a collective imaginary world. And you didn't have to play just human, though your choices were pretty limited in those days - elves, dwarves, halflings, half this, half orc, half that.
Along come home computers, and Lord British and Infocom are putting out games that seem to bear a passing resemblence in theme to the ol' dungeon crawl. Others jump on the bandwagon and pretty soon everyone and their brother is putting out RPG's, both paper and pen and beyond the CRT. Star Wars comes out, and TSR (Gygax et al) puts out Star Frontiers to break Roleplaying into the genre. Others follow suit, with varying degress of success, but in the early 80's, more gamers probably knew Star Frontiers than Other Suns (one of the first furry heavy scifi RPG's), or my personal fav, Traveller.
A side-growth of the whole text based computer adventure broke from Zork and went directly into the development of MUD's, then broke into MUCKs and MUSHs. See where I'm going with this? FurryMUCK becomes one of the early, premier roleplaying outlets for people imagining themselves to be something other than just human - indeed, distancing themselves quickly into a myriad of attempts to be anything but. Furry art is already out there, but there's a virtual explosion of it when Roleplaying gets tossed into the bag. Nearly everyone wants to see their -characters-, their avatars, their other selves, on paper, in pixels, or any other media they can get their hands on.
Come the 21'st century, early gamers have grown up, added their influences into pop culture, sometimes very subtly, sometimes not so much. Peter Jackson played AD&D. I'm not sure his Lord of the Rings would have been what it is, nor would, I think, New Line/Hollywood, et al, have even attempted such a venture at all, had not a few people remembered their Mtn. Dew and coffee table adventures and thought, this could be awesome.
Modern MMORPG's (World of Warcraft, for instance) can trace their ultimate origins, in many cases, to the trends put in motion by the pamphlets, the Blue or Red boxed sets, and early hardbound editions of Dungeons and Dragons, courtesy of Gygax's creative energies.
The connections I've laid out may be tenuous, but they're real - they happened. Very likely, without a Gary Gygax, the whole concept of gaming, of communication, of roleplaying, and even of furry art ... would be vastly different ... if they existed at all by this time in our history.
I'll thank and remember Mr. Gygax for that.
A complicated character who co-authored the original TSR Dungeons and Dragons, an outgrowth of the miniatures game Chainmail.
Criticisms aside, and there are quite a few, Mr. Gygax has had an indirect effect, I'd say, on just about everyone's lives who plays videogames, looks at furry art, mucks, or has seen a fantasy film on the big screen.
It was his grab-bag of everyone else's concepts of fantasy, Isaac Asimov, Tolkein, Lovecraft, Fritz Lieber, et al, that got chucked into the idea of Roleplaying as a passtime outside the field of acting before an audience. You hung out with a few friends (parent's basement and Mtn. Dew jokes aside), and immersed yourself in a collective imaginary world. And you didn't have to play just human, though your choices were pretty limited in those days - elves, dwarves, halflings, half this, half orc, half that.
Along come home computers, and Lord British and Infocom are putting out games that seem to bear a passing resemblence in theme to the ol' dungeon crawl. Others jump on the bandwagon and pretty soon everyone and their brother is putting out RPG's, both paper and pen and beyond the CRT. Star Wars comes out, and TSR (Gygax et al) puts out Star Frontiers to break Roleplaying into the genre. Others follow suit, with varying degress of success, but in the early 80's, more gamers probably knew Star Frontiers than Other Suns (one of the first furry heavy scifi RPG's), or my personal fav, Traveller.
A side-growth of the whole text based computer adventure broke from Zork and went directly into the development of MUD's, then broke into MUCKs and MUSHs. See where I'm going with this? FurryMUCK becomes one of the early, premier roleplaying outlets for people imagining themselves to be something other than just human - indeed, distancing themselves quickly into a myriad of attempts to be anything but. Furry art is already out there, but there's a virtual explosion of it when Roleplaying gets tossed into the bag. Nearly everyone wants to see their -characters-, their avatars, their other selves, on paper, in pixels, or any other media they can get their hands on.
Come the 21'st century, early gamers have grown up, added their influences into pop culture, sometimes very subtly, sometimes not so much. Peter Jackson played AD&D. I'm not sure his Lord of the Rings would have been what it is, nor would, I think, New Line/Hollywood, et al, have even attempted such a venture at all, had not a few people remembered their Mtn. Dew and coffee table adventures and thought, this could be awesome.
Modern MMORPG's (World of Warcraft, for instance) can trace their ultimate origins, in many cases, to the trends put in motion by the pamphlets, the Blue or Red boxed sets, and early hardbound editions of Dungeons and Dragons, courtesy of Gygax's creative energies.
The connections I've laid out may be tenuous, but they're real - they happened. Very likely, without a Gary Gygax, the whole concept of gaming, of communication, of roleplaying, and even of furry art ... would be vastly different ... if they existed at all by this time in our history.
I'll thank and remember Mr. Gygax for that.
Though kinda shocked - more since he was 68 - makes me feel older than I should. He had had a series of strokes before this, and an inoperable heart defect that caused complications.
Even though he'd long since ceased being a major contributer to what he created, it feels like the passing of an era.
Yeah, I really like the mustelid aliens and races! It's awesome ! :3
sorry for my bad English .