Exit the dragon master

If D&D is a nerd's pastime, then there are a lot of nerds around. Guesstimate calculations - it's impossible to reach a precise total - suggest that Dungeons & Dragons has about 25 million regular players worldwide. Certainly Gygax made more than $1bn in sales since he invented it in 1974, a figure which he claimed surprised him, saying he thought he would have made about $50,000. And the game's legacy has been massive. "Interactive fiction" - the first commercial example being Infocom's Zork of 1981 - occupies the same landscape of abandoned mine-workings, semi-medieval villages, mysterious strangers and supernatural monsters as D&D, sometimes quite explicitly, as in the Infocom trilogy of Enchanter, Sorcerer and Spellbreaker. Sophisticated graphic games such as World of Warcraft, Quake and Doom draw so heavily on the D&D mindset that it's hard to imagine them without it. MMUDs - "Massive Multi-Player Online Dungeons" - make their debt clear in the name, and you might even view Second Life as a D&D game without a quest. D&D reanimated the fantasy genre of fiction, whether straight or, as in the case of Terry Pratchett (whose first Discworld novel appeared in 1983), comic; geeks, after all, notoriously love intricate jokes. From the sublime - the Armoured Bears in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy - to Xena, Warrior Princess, the culture is rich in material which seems to link back to Gygax.