This is the best summary I could come up with:

With this letter, written by Gary Gygax to wargaming zine publisher Jim Lurvey, one of the founders of what would become TSR announced that a January 1974 release for Dungeons & Dragons was forthcoming.

You could argue whether a final draft, printing, announcement, sale, or first session counts as the true "birth" of D&D, but we have to go with something, and Peterson's reasoning seems fairly sound.

Books like Xanathar's Guide to Everything and Tasha's Cauldron of Everything will be codified and unified by a new sourcebook at some point, but all of it will be compatible with 5th Edition material.

And there's a 500-plus-page non-fiction book, The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons: 1970-1976, with research help from the aforementioned Peterson, containing never-before-seen correspondence between co-creators Gygax and Dave Arneson.

My cousin and I spent large parts of one summer attempting to play Marvel Super Heroes without understanding its D&D roots (or that it would always be a bit awkward with just two people).

And, of course, every video game, comic, novel, and other media I consumed that made a point of explaining how different classes worked, or the theory behind spells, owed something to D&D—by way of J.R.R.

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