…and if a stake isn’t driven through his heart, he’ll return as a vampire with HD 8+3, AC 0 and the level-drain power on top of his blowhard attacks.
Initially I was skeptical since the first sources were message boards and Wikipedia, but when it was declared on CNN, then I knew was closer to 100-percent true.
I was hoping to write a more neutral piece on him but there was a heated string of exchanges within my gaming group’s mailing list, getting my blood up unfortunately.
Unlike many gamers who met Gary, aka the EGG Man from his initials, I’m one of the few who actually worked with him (as an editor and proofreader/typesetter]. Sadly, it wasn’t during the rise or salad days of D&D but his poorly written, under-developed and horribly executed comeback Mythus, the game that torpedoed GDW; this huge flop accelerated the company’s demise by a couple years.
When I discovered D&D in 1981, the name Gary Gygax was held in awe. By the time I went to college, he didn’t really matter anymore. I had moved on to play better RPGs, he had been kicked out of TSR and my friend Neal told me about his encounter with Gygax at GenCon which boiled down to two words…big ego. There were other rumors too: Gary was hard to work with (true), he had a cocaine addiction (unknown), someone was suing him (true, Dave Arneson claimed part of the credit, hence the creation of Advanced D&D), etc.
Soon after joining GDW, I was brought in on the Mythus project in 1991 and I expressed my initial concerns of working with EGG, colored by those rumors. The president of the company, Frank, stated this shouldn’t be a problem. Gary had learned humility from his last few years “in the wilderness” and the recent fiascos of Cyborg Commando and Fantasy Master. Nothing could be further from the truth when I was his editor on The Necropolis adventure. He wouldn’t compromise, cooperate or even correct some major contradictions. Meanwhile, Gary was also undermining me through Frank by talking up some clod in California he had taken a liking to; someone who would roll over as his new lapdog editor. I should’ve taken the hint to bail on GDW by the Spring of 1992 after reading his raw, poorly written crap. It demonstrated to me that Mythus was not ready to publish as Gary and his agent Andre claimed. His writing style was also terrible, clunky, pompous and verbose. He made Charles Dickens or Henry James seem concise. Gary also wrote like someone with a 9th-grade education using a thesaurus (I was close, he only had a GED). As I kept telling head editor Lester in our heated debates over what could be corrected, ignorance isn’t style.
To be fair to him in death, I do thank him for being the main guy to start a good idea. However, pre-Second Edition Dungeons & Dragons became the success it was thanks to the hard work of Frank Mentzer, Zeb Cook, Skip Williams, Allen Hammack, Harold Johnson, James Ward, Doug Niles, Mark Acres, Roger Moore, Kim Mohan, Don Turnbull and an army of additional writers, editors and developers. I equate Gary with Gene Roddenberry for his ability to take the credit for what others did.
Sorry, if it this sounds nasty and mean but all my fond memories of Gary’s famous dungeon crawls evaporated instantly when I had to work with him. He was creative, charming and D&D’s first rock star, even his cameo on Futurama brought a chuckle. It’s his opportunistic and vain nature that will always taint his legacy.
Update Mar 5, 2008: I was really tired and in a hurry to post this before bed around midnight. I had a big night participating in the Democratic Caucus for my precinct. After reading the original, it was too vitriolic even for my tastes so I trimmed it down and brought in some nice things about Gary. He will be missed by everyone, including his detractors.