My Father the Dungeon Master
Gary Gygax
Ernest Gary Gygax, born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1938, was a game designer best known for creating Dungeons & Dragons with Dave Arneson in 1974. D&D went on to become the bestselling role-playing game in the world, with more than $1 billion in book and accessory sales and an estimated 20 million players. However, Gygax lost control of his company TSR, Inc., in 1985 and spent many years and his entire fortune trying to regain it. He had six children, Ernest Jr., Mary, Heidi, Cindy, Lucion, and Alexander. He died in 2008, at age seventy, having never regained control of TSR or his beloved game.
Gary and Lucion at GenCon (the largest tabletop-game convention in North America), in Indianapolis, Indiana, 2001
my father was fired from his job as an insurance underwriter at Fireman’s Fund on October 12, 1970. His newly promoted boss, Bruno, purposely picked that day because he knew it was my mother’s birthday. To make matters worse, my mother was eight months pregnant with me, her fifth child. Bruno and my dad had been peers in the company, but Bruno didn’t like my father because he was so good at the job that he would finish his work in half the time it took Bruno. Instead of doing the conventional thing and “looking busy,” my dad would invite friends over during work hours to play war games. When Bruno got the promotion, he gleefully fired my dad to remove a potential rival. The ride back on the train from Chicago to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, was long that day, as my father had to tell my mom that he was unemployed and they no longer had insurance coverage.
The silver lining was that my dad was entitled to unemployment payments. He discussed the situation with my mom and presented her with two options: they could move out of state so he could find another job in the insurance field (since Bruno had essentially blacklisted him with other firms in the Chicago area), or he could try to make it as an author. Moving would be difficult, as my parents were poor and neither had a driver’s license. My mom supported his dream to become a writer and agreed to live on the meager unemployment checks as he gave it a go.
My father diligently banged away on his typewriter late into the night, and my mother endeavored to keep all of us quiet until noon so he could sleep. He completed a novel called The Horn Bow and sent it out to several publishers, only to receive rejection letter after rejection letter. Try as they might, my parents couldn’t meet our family of seven’s needs on unemployment. So my grandmother Almina, better known to me as Murmur, purchased all the machinery from a shoe-repair shop and paid for three weeks of cobbling lessons for my dad. She knew that her son was best suited to being his own boss.
This is how my father came to be a cobbler in Lake Geneva in 1973. The shoe-repair industry didn’t pay well. Food was scarce. My mother gardened, canned vegetables, baked bread, and generally did her best to help us subsist. The elder children got their clothes from secondhand stores, and the younger ones wore hand-me-downs. Our life was difficult, so when a local businessman offered my twelve-year-old brother, Ernie, a job as a shoeshine boy, my parents agreed to let him accept it. Ernie enjoyed the work and brought home two hundred dollars in a week. My parents were stunned; they started asking questions about the job, and that’s how they found out that Ernie was shining shoes at the Playboy Club. The money was fantastic, but they weren’t going to let him work at such a place. Shortly thereafter, my parents swallowed their pride and applied for food stamps. With government aid, they were able to put enough food on the table to feed the family. This was the state of the Gygax family when my dad created Dungeons & Dragons.
The way it happened is this: Through some fellow gamers, my father was introduced to Dave Arneson, who had developed a new twist on fantasy miniature gaming. My dad invited Arneson to Lake Geneva and had him run a session. Immediately Dad saw the potential in this idea and how it could be, pardon my pun, a game changer. There wasn’t a rule set developed yet, so he began working on a way to translate this concept into words so that others could create their own fantastic adventures.
Dad took these components, Arneson’s rough concept, and decades of science fiction and fantasy reading and started crafting what would come to be known as Dungeons & Dragons. His excitement about this new game was boundless. But when he took it to game publishers, they all passed.
That didn’t deter him. Dad was all in. He was convinced that D&D would usher in a new era of gaming. But how could he bring this wonderful new game to the market? He was a cobbler barely able to provide for his young family. Finally, his lifelong friend Don Kaye agreed to help him out. Don was a machinist and didn’t have much money, either, but he cashed in a life insurance policy to get one thousand dollars, enough to start Tactical Studies Rules, the company that would publish the three core rules volumes for D&D: Men & Magic, Monsters & Treasure, and The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures.
The game came out in 1974, and its popularity built slowly at first, then more rapidly. My father’s instincts were right, and the future looked bright. This was the beginning of a radical change for my family. Suddenly we had money. Dad went from being that poor guy with long hair to a respected entrepreneur.
After years of renting, we finally bought a house. But the thing I remember most about our change of fortune was going to the grocery store. “Can we have this cereal?” one of us kids would ask, pointing to a name-brand box like King Vitaman or Cap’n Crunch, and for the first time that we could remember, Mom said yes.
For a while, things were idyllic. But in the 1980s, everything began to sour. The new investors Dad brought in after Don Kaye died, tragically, in 1976, had gotten the company in financial trouble despite record sales of D&D. During this time, my parents filed for divorce and began a protracted and contentious battle that lasted several years. Dad moved out to Los Angeles to try to get a D&D movie made. He succeeded in getting a D&D cartoon on the air, but he was never able to get the movie into development. He was splitting his time between Lake Geneva and LA, trying to manage both aspects of the company as well as he could.
That would change in 1985, when, after a bitter dispute, my dad was removed as chairman from the company he had founded. Dungeons & Dragons and all the intellectual property he had created were held by the company. He had started TSR with his close friend and never envisioned a hostile stock takeover. Dad would go on to spend all the money he had trying to get the company back, but he was never able to prove his case in court. In a few short years, we went from being financially comfortable to once again being poor. I graduated valedictorian of my class in 1988 and headed off to college at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. However, my family didn’t have money to send me back for my sophomore year. I decided to join the army to pay my own way through college when I got out, and that’s what I did. I told Dad after I’d already enlisted. He was against it, but I think he understood and eventually was proud of my decision.
That was in 1989. I have served continuously since then, both on active duty and as a reservist. Currently I am serving on active duty as the operations officer for the 224th Sustainment Brigade in the California Army National Guard. I’ve served two tours in Iraq and earned a Combat Infantryman’s Badge, a Bronze Star, and numerous other awards. I found that all the role-playing games I played with my dad served me well in my career as a soldier. I practiced many skills at the gaming table and didn’t even realize it until much later. I learned how to improvise, to problem-solve, to influence others, to read small-group dynamics, and to speak persuasively. Those were skills I learned not only from playing games with my dad but also through watching how steadfast he remained, navigating the twists and turns, the peaks and valleys of his life, eye always steady on the horizon.