Gary Gygax, the creator of the first role-playing game “Dungeons and Drangons”, died at his home in Lake Geneva, at the age of sixty-nine.

According to the Associated Press, his wife informed that he had been suffering from an inoperable abdominal aneurysm for a long time. He was survived by his wife, as well as by his six children: three sons and three daughters.

Despite his illnesses, Gygax was always present at game conventions and was always happy to see people’s gratitude towards him, for having helped them become doctors or lawyers through his work, his wife declared, in an interview for the Associated Press.

The father of role-playing game first created the game in 1974, and it was so successful that it led to many other different products, such as magazines, TV series and also including the computer game version, the MMORPG Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach.

An estimated 20 million people all over the world have played the game, with more than $1 billion spent on equipment and books.

Even though almost all computers role-playing nowadays have been inspired by the rules and settings of Gygax’s game, Gygax himself was never a big supporter of video games, considering they didn’t require the use of one’s imagination.

“There is no intimacy; it’s not live,” he said of online games. “It’s being translated through a computer, and your imagination is not there the same way it is when you’re actually together with a group of people. It reminds me of one time where I saw some children talking about whether they liked radio or television, and I asked one little boy why he preferred radio, and he said, ‘Because the pictures are so much better’,” he used to say, as reported by The New York Times.