Before long, D & D conventions were set up around the country and the game inspired everything from movies to the first video games. The backlash only fueled the fires of the young fans who continued to play the game, escaping into imaginary worlds.

By the late 1970s the game had become so popular among kids that parents started to worry - so much so that a mom's group was formed to alert parents to the dangers of role play and fantasy. A creative mind with no real knowledge of business, he made some strategic errors and had a falling out with the game's co-creator, his close friend and partner, David Arneson.

Gygax was a purist, in the sense that he was adamant that players use their imaginations and that the rules of the game remain flexible. Starting out in the basement of his home, he was soon struggling to keep up with the demand. In the mid-1970s, he co-created the wildly popular Dungeons & Dragons game. An imaginative misfit, he escaped into a virtual world based on science fiction novels, military history and strategic games like chess. Gygax was the son of immigrants who grew up in Lake Geneva, WI, in the 1950s. Like the game itself, the narrative casts the reader into the adventure from a first person point of view, taking on the roles of the different characters in the story. 'Rise of the Dungeon Master tells, in graphic form, the story of Gary Gygax, co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, one of the most influential games ever made.

Love Addict by Koren Shadmi