I can’t say that I was ever that connected to him as anything other than a name on a book cover… Yeah, I played AD&D when I was a kid, but I branched out to other (and better, in my opinion) games quickly after getting introduced to role-playing games as a concept. I knew who he was only vaguely, in that he had “invented” Dungeons And Dragons… but it is much the same as Noah Webster = Dictionary, at least for me personally. He was highly regarded by a lot of people, though, and Websnark does a fair job sumarrizing Gygax’s impact on popular culture here.