An homage to the man behind Dungeons & Dragons

Gary Gygax helped keep me out of trouble when I was in junior high school.

I was saddened earlier Tuesday to hear that Gygax, the co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons and the father of modern role-playing games, has died. He was 69 years old. My CNET Reviews colleague Will Greenwald has already written about Gygax's role in the gaming community. (Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

For many of us who grew up before PCs became ubiquitous and long before it was cool to be a geek, Gygax's creation meant Friday nights spent playing games with your friends, not wishing you were someone else. Instead of finding creative ways to break the law, we were busy rolling 20-sided dice and doing battle with Orcs and other evil beasts.

It was a fantastical world for adolescents. Gygax managed to mix The Lord of the Rings and mythology with comic book adventures. Naturally, there were absurd D&D-related scares in the early-1980s regarding kids delving into Satanism and disastrous episodes of real-life sword fighting. (I always thought if kids were dumb enough to fight with real swords, they had bigger issues than the influence of a role-playing game).

My own memories: Before moving on to the decidedly autocratic role of Dungeon Master, my favorite D 9--not so good.

I also seem to recall my ranger/barkeep met his untimely demise at the hands of an Ochre Jelly monster that made a home in his bar. It was an ignominious death for a guy named after a mighty Japanese warrior.

Times have changed, of course. Like most kids, I moved on from D&D and hadn't even looked at a D&D book in decades, until a former colleague of mine brought his son's old gaming books into the office. While we may have been oddball hobbyists 25 years ago, role-playing games are now mainstream, thanks to gaming consoles and the Internet. World of Warcraft is a billion-dollar enterprise, and D&D lives on in various forms. But without D&D paving the way, it's hard to imagine WoW would even exist.

So let's pay our respects: You have to wonder how many of today's writers, computer programmers, video game creators, and other creative sorts wiled away their winter nights playing D&D. Thanks, Mr. Gygax. You allowed us to use our brains.