Role-Playing Games. Not some lumbering beast, but a thousand thousand variants on a theme. Evolution. From strategic miniature simulations came the idea of playing a Tolkien world, developing characters and doing more than dealing with raw numbers.
The man who in most people's minds brought that whole world to the light of day and spawned an entire industry (which in turn spawned the computer gaming industry to a great degree) was E. Gary Gygax.
Last night he failed his saving throw and passed away.
Sadly, no healing potions will aid him now. No party member will be carting him off to the nearest temple for resurrection. He's gone.
But in his wake what a vista!
His game (his and Dave Arneson's) was Dungeons and Dragons. Here's just one kind of spin-off.
A guy named Richard Garriott played D&D and decided to make a version of that on his Apple computer. That game was Akalabeth, which evolved into Ultima. Ultima begat many sequels, and Garriott eventually created Ultima Online.
This was really the first successful MMORPG with a mainstream draw (not to demean all the MUD players out there - I feel ya playhuzzzz).
Effectively Garriot had evolved D&D type play into a fees-per-month monetized Internet-based community driven extravaganza.
Which really drove folks like Blizzard to make World-of-Warcraft. And if you've paused from playing WOW long enough to read this entry, then you should say a kind word in memory of E. Gary Gygax - a man who helped entertain millions even if he didn't make that much money doing it.
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