Reinhold Wittig, our highly esteemed honorary member, passed away on April 11.

There is much to say about Reinhold’s work—whether his marionettes, the Planetary Path, or his plays: Creating works of art from scrap and then using them to perform theater, or conversely creating games based on literary works, transforming physical experiments into play objects—it seems like the art of a magician. Reinhold Wittig was able—in addition to his profession as a geologist—to move wonderfully between these worlds.

Some of his marionettes will be on display in a Munich museum in the future. His games can be found on many game shelves—at least those published by larger publishers.

Numerous works have also been published in very small print runs by his own Perlhuhn Edition—many of them are both games and works of art. This applies to his own games as well as to those by other authors that he published.

Game designers owe Reinhold a great deal: On his initiative, the famous beer mat was created in 1988, signed by 13 designers: “None of us will submit a game to a publisher unless our name is at the top of the box.”

As early as five years earlier, in 1983, Reinhold invited people to a game designers’ meeting in Göttingen. It was a small group of participants, for whom spaghetti was cooked in the Wittig household that evening. The camaraderie among game designers was close to Reinhold’s heart, and even though the Game Designers’ Meeting has since grown significantly larger and is now used much more frequently to present prototypes to publishers, it was almost always accompanied by a spaghetti dinner where wonderful connections could be made and nurtured. Reinhold was able to attend until the very end and enjoy the lively atmosphere of the gathering.

When the Game Designers’ Guild was founded in 1991, Reinhold was actually not among the founding members—but his wife at the time, Karin, was. A Game Designers’ Guild without Reinhold was apparently inconceivable, so he was named an honorary member in the very year of its founding.

Were there even any game designers before Reinhold Wittig? Of course there were, but before Reinhold’s work, they largely led anonymous, shadowy lives and were scarcely recognized by players and publishers as the creators of their works. With the term “game designer,” Reinhold underscored the cultural and artistic significance of creating games and helped game design develop a self-assured sense of identity.

The game designers’ community thanks you, Reinhold, for your numerous initiatives, your focus on community, and, not least, for enriching our lives.