Gary Gygax and the Game That Changed Everything

In a modest house on Center Street in downtown Lake Geneva, a man named Gary Gygax spent the late nineteen sixties and early nineteen seventies developing a game that would eventually be played by tens of millions of people around the world. Gygax was born in Chicago in nineteen thirty-eight and moved to Lake Geneva as a child. He was a passionate player of tabletop wargames and began experimenting with rules for a new kind of game in which players would take on the roles of individual characters in a fantasy world, making decisions and rolling dice to determine outcomes, rather than commanding armies from a removed position.

Working with a game designer in Minneapolis named Dave Arneson, Gygax developed what would become Dungeons and Dragons. In October of nineteen seventy-three, Gygax and his childhood friend Donald Kaye formed a company called Tactical Studies Rules, known by the initials TSR, to publish the game. Dungeons and Dragons appeared in January of nineteen seventy-four.

It invented the role-playing game as a distinct medium and seeded an industry that now spans video games, film, and literature. At its peak in the early nineteen eighties, TSR employed roughly four hundred people in Lake Geneva, a town of fewer than six thousand residents, importing writers, artists, and editors from across the country. Gygax died in Lake Geneva in two thousand eight and is buried there.

A memorial statue stands in downtown Lake Geneva, and the town hosts a convention called Gary Con each March, drawing thousands of role-playing enthusiasts who come to play games in the town where the first one was invented.