Gary Gygax, co-creator of the fantasy role-playing phenomenon “Dungeons and Dragons”, is dead at age 69. Long suffering from health problems, he succumbed to an inoperable abdominal aneurysm on Mar. 4, 2008, at his home in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. He is survived by wife Gail Gygax and six children.

“Gary really popularized gaming. His game was really for role-playing more than any other.” A player of Dungeons and Dragons, popularly known as D&D, said.

The game itself is widely recognized as the ancestor of most other role-playing systems and an entire genre of adventure video games. The game has also been an inspiration for hundreds of spin-off novels, movies, and television programs, including an early 80s cartoon show.

Dungeons and Dragons got its start in miniature war games. Gygax himself started with the Avalon Hill company’s game “Gettysburg.” He later began designing his own games and, with the help of Jeff Perren, created the medieval miniature war game “Chainmail.”

It was from Chainmail, that D&D was developed as more than just a game in which the player commanded an army, but a game in which the player became the character of a story.

After founding Tactical Studies Rules, Inc. with Don Kaye in 1973, Gygax and Dave Arneson wrote and produced the first thousand hand-assembled copies of “Dungeons and Dragons Rulebook.” The initial success resulted in many copycats, however the original outlasted them.

The game is now in its fourth edition and has undergone a great degree of simplification of the rules system and is still enjoyed worldwide.

Gygax said previously, “The essence of a role playing game is that it is a group cooperative experience. There is no winning or losing, but rather the value is in the experience of imagining yourself as a character in whatever genre you’re involved in whether it’s a fantasy, the “wild west,” secret agents or whatever else. You get to sort of vicariously experience those things.”