Obit: Arneson, D&D co-creator
By Staff -- Playthings, 4/13/2009 10:49:00 AM
REDMOND, Wash.—Dave Arneson, co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, passed away on April 7 from cancer. He was 61.
Arneson co-created the genre-defining role-playing game in the early '70s with Gary Gygax, a dedicated tabletop war gamer he met in 1969 at a gaming event Gygax founded that would eventually become GenCon.
The duo’s primary innovation was to allow players’ self-created heroes to be used in a series of games, becoming more powerful with each battle, and that their battles could be part of larger adventures set in the types of fantastic worlds popular in sword & sorcery fiction, according to D&D publisher Wizards of the Coast.
The game was based largely on an earlier game Arneson created called Blackmoor, additional elements of which appeared in a later supplement of D&D. TSR released the first edition of D&D in 1974. Wizards of the Coast purchased the company in 1997.
Subsequently, Arneson published other role-playing games (Adventures in Fantasy), started his own game-publishing company (Adventure Games) and computer game company (4D Interactive Systems), taught classes in game design and lectured on educational role-playing.
Gary Gygax died in March 2008.
In other Wizards of the Coast news, on April 6 the company filed three lawsuits in US District Court for the Western District of Washington against eight individuals, including defendants in the U.S., Poland and the Philippines, for copyright infringement of its recently-released Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook 2 (pictured).
Wizards’ lawsuits allege that the defendants illegally distributed the Player’s Handbook 2 via free file-sharing websites and that these uploads resulted in “a substantial number of lost sales and lost revenue to Wizards of the Coast,” according to the company.
“Violations of our copyrights and piracy of our products hurt not only Wizards of the Coast’s financial health but also the health of whole gaming community including retailers and players,” said Greg Leeds, Wizards of the Coast president. “We have brought these suits to stop the illegal activities of these defendants, and to deter future unauthorized and unlawful file-sharing.”
The complaint alleges, among other things, that one or more of the defendants purchased digital copies of Player’s Handbook 2 and then illegally posted the copies onto popular file-sharing sites for free access and download by the general public.
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