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Gary Gygax Tribute |
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Posted on Thursday, March 13 at 1:54 PM GMT -6
The editors at Eurogamer have taken the time to do their own little tribute to the late Gary Gygax with an article that discusses the influence Dungeons & Dragons has had on videogame culture.
Moral panics aside, however, D&D changed the world in which we live. Its influence on videogames is obvious. There's all of the officially licensed games, for a start - a surprising proportion of which are, like the Gold Box series, the Baldur's Gate games, and Planescape: Torment, utterly brilliant. There are also all those other classic sword and sorcery RPGs that took their inspiration from Gygax's invention, such as Wizardry, or Ultima, which in turn gave rise to Japanese console RPGs, like Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy. But in many ways, the entire videogame industry owes its existence to Gary Gygax - and not simply because, one way or another, almost every modern videogame is a role-playing game of some kind.
Sure, a lot of the very earliest videogames had very little to do with pen-and-paper role-playing games - games like Spacewar!, for example, or Pong. And many modern-day videogames apparently have little to do with Gelatinous Cubes or Kobolds, or Carrion Crawlers. But the success of D&D was an essential ingredient in the growth of the medium. Games such as Adventure, Dungeon, and Rogue, created an appeal that went beyond shooting games and sports sims, and something more enduring than the quick thrills of the coin-op. By exerting such a massive influence on games, Gygax has, indirectly, exerted a similarly pronounced influence on all aspects of popular culture which have, in turn, been influenced by games - movies, music, and art. More importantly, because these early D&D-influenced games were designed for university mainframes, they also inspired early game creators and shape the entire geek subculture that has shaped the world as we know it today.
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