Dungeon Master: The Life and Legacy of Gary Gygax
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D&D's impact was as instantaneous as a chain lightning spell. It spread from college to college, hobby shop to hobby shop, schoolyard to schoolyard. Ten months after D&D's launch, TSR sold out its press run and printed twice as many copies of the game. Soon it had sold out again, wiping mold off the last few copies in Gygax's musty cellar to fill orders. Players began calling Gygax's house at all hours of the night, asking for the volume of space covered by a certain spell, or asking him to test their game design by DMing being a dungeon master for them over the phone.
TSR made profitable upgrades to its operating system (The Advanced D&D Handbook soon appeared, along with the hardback Monster Manual by Gygax that simply gave descriptions and numerical attributes of the many different kinds of foul creatures that players might face). Anyone could build individual applications that ran on top of the rules, but TSR also sold the equivalent of software. For about $5, you could buy these prepackaged campaigns and scenarios by Arneson or Gygax or other emerging stars of the tabletop gaming industry.
"The modules were even more profitable than the rules were," Arneson says, who over the course of the 1970s saw the effect that D&D had on the gaming audience. "The whole tenor of the crowd changed," he says. "War gamers sat around talking about the latest historical books, but these D&D guys were from the science fiction community. And there were women! You go from having none at a convention to having whoo! 20 percent women! No groupies though, darn it."
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Meanwhile, college kids monkeying around on enormous mainframe computers found themselves drawn to the familiar systems of the game. In 1976, MIT student Will Crowther combined his interests in fantasy role-playing and spelunking to map out the first text-based adventure game, Colossal Cave Adventure. By typing in a direction, such as "north" or "south," or a command, as in "hit" or "attack," players could battle enemies and hunt for treasure. Before long, students and hackers in computer labs across the country were playing and modifying the text-based game's code. "It added automated moderation so you didn't need the human game master," says Don Woods, a Stanford student who created a spin-off with Crowther's blessing.
In 1978, students at the University of Essex in England pioneered a way to emulate the multiplayer experience of D&D across the Arpanet. Richard Bartle coded the first multiuser dungeon. A MUD is a text-based game with D&D mechanics of experience points and levels, and an emphasis on socialization and chatting. "MUD was just a continuation of what I was doing in D&D," Bartle says.
Richard Garriott encountered the game at computer camp in 1977. After organizing D&D sessions back home, he ported the role-playing experience into PC games like Akalabeth and later the Ultima franchise. He says that D&D's primordial game engine was a perfect match for number-crunching home computers. "D&D allowed people to build a numerical representation of themselves, a numerical representation of a monster, a numerical representation of how a character and monsters could interact," he says. "If there had never been D&D, computer games would be more like simple arcade games, like Pac-Man and Pong."
"That cooperative experience ports over really well to digital media, especially with the rise of the Internet," says Chris "Thundergod" Metzen, vice president of creative development at Blizzard Entertainment. His company's massively multiplayer role-playing game World of Warcraft attracts 10 million subscribers, who all pay to log into a 3-D virtual world and join other players in battling monsters, exploring for loot, and leveling up. "Players around the world are forming friendships and having adventures," Metzen says. "Part of the magic is that it hearkens back to those dateless nights playing D&D."
There are some neat pictures of Gygax and D&D in general embedded within the article, as well.
