The gaming community suffered a terrible loss on Tuesday, when Ernest Gary Gygax, the role-playing game pioneer and creator of Dungeons & Dragons died at the age of 69 at his home in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.  Gygax was known for his health problems, but despite all, he was always present at game conventions, and was most proud of his achievements, in the sense that he was always happy to hear people thanking him for helping them become a doctor or a lawyer through his work, his wife said in an AP interview.

The father of role-playing game started the Dungeons & Dragons-mania back in 1974, going from the role-playing game to various other related products, such as magazines, TV series and the computer game version, the MMORPG Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach. Over three years, Gygax managed to go beyond his initial 50,000 copies sold objective, and went on to capture the attention of 20 million people worldwide. That only goes to show that good things have no age, and three decades only made Dungeon & Dragons attract more and more people.

Gygax has been fascinated with games ever since he was a child, but unlike others, he went on with his passion and turned it into a worldwide phenomenon. He first started to publish Dungeons & Dragons in 1974, in collaboration with Don Kaye, one year after establishing the Tactical Studies Rules publishing company one year earlier. He was a passionate of everything related to the Medieval period and the Dark Ages, and that showed in his creation.

In a GameSpy interview, Gygax said: “I would like the world to remember me as the guy who really enjoyed playing games and sharing his knowledge and his fun pastimes with everybody else,” and indeed he will be remembered and missed by the entire gaming community. Ernest Gary Gygax was the man who put a story behind a game and gave a whole new meaning to board games, by combining fantasy and imagination with strategy and role-playing.