My wife and I just started an actual face-to-face D&D game a few weeks ago. She's the DM. My fighter just made it to 2nd level.
I used to play (in the early 80s) with the 1st edition rules which were "half-sheet" booklets (8 1/2 x 11 sheets folded). Gary almost single-handedly moved gaming out of the hands of historical gamers and into the hands of "normal" people by creating rules that could be easily understood, even by a junior-high kid (which I was at the time) and by publishing affordable rules.
Unless I'm badly mistaken, he also pioneered the "half-sheet" booklet idea, which made it possible for small publishers to cheaply publish rules, a format followed by GDW (Traveller) and ADB (Star Fleet Battles) (among others), which further expanded gaming into the mainstream. The Traveller LBB (Little Black Book) is a much-loved format even today, nearly 30 years later.
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