The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
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7:54am on Friday, 6th December, 2024:
Anecdote
I've just finished reading Playing at the World 2nd Edition, volume 1: The Invention of Dungeons & Dragons, by Jon Peterson.
I met both Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson (Arneson was the nicer person in my view), but I was expecting to read their names in a book about Dungeons & Dragons. What I wasn't expecting was the number of names that I knew from my teenage years in the UK postal games hobby, many of whom I met either at the time or later. This is despite the book's understandable focus on the United States.
Looking through the index, the names of (at the time) contemporary designers I recognise are:
M A R Barker, Tony Bath, Alan B Calhamer, Greg Costikyan, Liz Danforth, James F Dunnigan, Donald Featherstone, Lee Gold, Walter Luc Haas, Arnold Hendrick, Steve Jackson, Donald R Kaye, Michael F Korns, Rob Kuntz, Ian Livingstone, Rick Loomis, Hartley Patterson, Fletcher Pratt, Lewis Pulsipher, Sid Sackson, Ken St Andre, Mark Swanson, Loren Wiseman. I only met seven of these, but the names were definitely known to me at the time. There are other names that ring bells, but their names are fairly common so they might belong to different people.
Still, given that I was very much only on the periphery, it was quite fun suddenly coming across the name of someone I'd heard of. The hobby back then was small.
I also know the names of the dozen or so SF and Fantasy authors and editors mentioned, of course, but that's not because I came across them playing games by post.
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Copyright © 2024 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).