Story of Gary Gygax & Lake Geneva

Gary Gygax (1938-2008) was an novelist, game designer, entrepreneur, and visionary who lived in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin and was the co-creator of the Dungeons & Dragons® game in 1974. The game, D&D® for short, was the first role-playing game ever and, as such, was only the seventh type table-top game created by humanity.

Can we say who created chess? Or dice? No, of course not, but we can name the person who authored Dungeons & Dragons®, and he did it in our lifetime, in the United States, in the little town of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.

The game itself was born in Gary's little house at 330 Center Street in 1974. Since that time the game has become a truly global phenomenon. An estimated 50 million people have played the game since it was created and it’s been translated into dozens of languages. Sales indicate that 14 million people are currently playing it and 9 million people watch live streams of other people playing it.

The first company ever to produce role-playing games was also started by Gary in Lake Geneva in 1973. Tactical Studies Rules (TSR) started out of Gary's friend Don Kaye’s home at 542 Sage Street and Gary’s house at 330 Center Street and, in 1976, moved to 723 Williams Street with ten employees. The wild success of D&D® grew the company until they moved into the Hotel Clair building on Broad Street and Main with 100 employees. Ultimately, TSR employed over 400 people and resided in the business complex on Sheridan Springs Road for the next several years.

Gary also founded the largest tabletop gaming convention in North America, naming it Geneva Convention or GEN CON. He ran the very first GEN CON at Horticultural Hall in 1968, again in his hometown of Lake Geneva. As it grew, it expanded to the American Legion Hall, then to the Lake Geneva Playboy Club in 1977, until it grew beyond the little town. It now has an attendance of 60,000 gamers and is a major source of income for the city of Indianapolis every summer.

Gary was an avid science fiction and fantasy reader and aspired to become a writer himself. He actively encouraged the publication of fiction from very early on at his company, TSR. Eventually, TSR would become a major publisher of fantasy and science-fiction, publishing over 360 novels and 260 short stories over the next three decades by such notable authors as Alan Dean Foster, Andre Norton, Ben Bova, Clark Ashton Smith, Fritz Leiber, Gardner Fox, George R. R. Martin, L. Sprague de Camp, Lynn Abbey, Terry Brooks, and over 400 other authors. While tens of millions of people have played Gary's game, D&D®, hundreds of millions of fans worldwide have read novels published in Lake Geneva thanks to his vision.

Gary became a best selling novelist in the mid-1980s, achieving that distinction several times, and did his writing at Stone Manor, where he resided. As Gary continued to design games and author novels, he quietly settled into his final Lake Geneva home at 316 Madison Street where he passed away in 2008.