The E. Gary Gygax Collection

The Collector's Trove has been authorized by Gail Gygax to auction thousands of items from the collection of E. Gary Gygax.

These items were acquired by Gary over 55 years of amateur and professional involvement in war games, strategy games, card games, board games, and role-playing games, over a decade of that time spent as President of TSR, a company he founded, the company that launched the role-playing game industry. They also come from his time as head of Dungeons & Dragons Entertainment Corporation as he worked toward a Dungeons & Dragons feature length movie and produced the highly successful Dungeons & Dragons Saturday morning cartoon series. Finally, a number of the items come from his tenure as a fantasy and sci-fi publisher through NIPI and Trigee and as author of the popular Gord the Rogue and Magister Setne Inhetep novels and short stories.

Before Dungeons & Dragons, there were only six sorts of table-top games: pen and paper, board, card, dice, tile, and miniature games. When Gary wrote and published the rules for Dungeons & Dragons it introduced the world to whole new sort of game - the role-playing game. Furthermore, it introduced several novel concepts, not the least of which was that the players worked in a cooperative effort against the designs of a neutral referee. The popularity of this new form of gaming led early computer programmers to design programs that recreated their own Dungeons & Dragons experience. These games ultimately led to an explosion of interest and commercial success for fantasy and sci-fi adventure computer games, including those played over the internet and shared by millions of people worldwide. This has generated a level of economic success that has eclipsed the income of both the television and movie industry combined!

Gary's story is an American story. The story of an inventor and innovator. The story of a creator and a dreamer. The story of determination and daring. History will ultimately tell how Gary changed the world. All for the love of games.