I played D&D with the Gygax family almost every weekend as a teenager. They were fundamental to shaping my teenage years and beyond. I will never forget random

I played D&D with the Gygax family almost every weekend as a teenager. They were fundamental to shaping my teenage years and beyond. I will never forget randomly stumbling into The Game Guild in Lake Geneva on a school trip, meeting the group of people playing D&D in the back room filled with soda and pizza boxes, and then finding out that the DM and another player were actually Gary's sons, Ernie and Luke. I drove up every weekend to play for 2 years from that point, and every weekend when back from college. It helped me come out of my shell and become more social, and caused me to start my own local D&D group. This eventually turned into me growing my own group of friends after having moved and not knowing anyone. I created another group in college with the same result. I also of course jumped at the chance to join one at work when a colleague started one up which has brought me closer to my co-workers. It also taught me physics and math, because our entire party almost got incinerated due to a miscalculation of fireball volume. I'll also never forget casually mentioning a Mordenkainen spell, only to have one of the players make some joke indicating that he had created the spell. Turns out the original Mordenkainen was one of his characters. And someone else there was Bigby, and Tenser. No real point to this point other than to thank the Gygax family for making my teenage years more memorable.