gary gygax

I must break the monastic vow of silence to remark upon the death of a most influential figure in gaming history, Gary Gygax. He is most famous for appearing on Futurama in the first "What if?" machine episode as a member of Al Gore's special envoy tasked with protecting the space-time continuum --also, he created some tabletop game called "Dungeons & Dragons." His creation led to widespread virginity among a certain kind of teenage male, fucking 9000 sided dice, collectable card games, and eventually, computer role playing games like Wizardry -- and because the entire Japanese RPG genre would not exist without Wizardry, I mourn Mr. Gygax's death.

I have played very little of the tabletop game. Actually, I think I only played D&D once, at Jon Clay's house with Ford Walker and... someone else? I do remember creating an incredibly surly dwarf named Sal Magicpants, famous for his recklessness in battle and his refusal to use any sort of healing magic on the grounds that healing was for pussies.

However, the influence of Dungeons & Dragons runs -- nay, gallops -- though the games I played as a teenager. I was into PC gaming in the late 90's, back when PC's were viable gaming platforms and I had more patience for bullshit technical problems and nonsensical adventure game puzzles (like that goddamn cat hair mustache puzzle in Gabriel Knight III. That singlehandedly killed the entire genre.)

I had few friends during my freshman and sophomore years of high school, but I did have a fairly expensive computer I built myself (with help from Mr. Katz). We bought the parts from a sleazy Russian guy at the now defunct Ceder Mill Computers. The machine had a penchant for crashing whenever the GPU was asked to render anything more complex than Bejeweled. I loved it.

One of the first things I acquired for that machine was Baulder's Gate. I played the hell out of it -- although how much time I spent swapping discs in relation to playing the actual game is an open question.

That was the sole canonical D&D experience I've had. However, look at this list: Fallout, Fallout 2, Ultima Online, Diablo II, Dungeon Siege, Myth, Myth II, and, er, Vampire: The Last Crusade. That was what I did in high school. I played those games; fucking hell, I solved many of those games. I almost never finish games, but those with the Gary Gygax influence were of such quality (other than Vampire: The Last Crusade, which was terrible) I just couldn't quit on them.

So, Mr. Gygax, thank you for retarding my social life inadvertently -- I was not ready to interact with girls in 1999, and you helped me pass the time I would have otherwise spent masturbating, further delaying my eventual ascent into semi-maturity.