I wrote this article (sorry, I have no karma here, so I imagine this comment may plummet into the void), and I am frustrated to see the clickbaity way it's presented here. Wargaming was a very open and collaborative environment where ideas moved quite fluidly: this is the fun of studying it, actually, as tracing ideas over time is quite a challenge. The message I was trying to get across here is that Chainmail, to say nothing of the many, many games that built on its system and setting, owes an unacknowledged debt to Patt. I think this is big news for people who care about the origins of gaming today.
The debt isn't the idea of a fireball or whatever; fireballs are something that have long existed in fact and fiction. But identifying the original fantasy game to feature the fireball mechanic is an important historical question. The fireball that Patt seems to have invented has a lot of very specific features: it explodes at range (24 inches in game), you get a saving throw against it, but no save if you're a dragon as it instead drives you away for one turn, and so on. These are all system mechanics that Chainmail used, and which thus inspired D&D. That we owe some amount of the credit for that to someone other than the stated authors of Chainmail is noteworthy.
It would be like if we hadn't known that Shakespeare had relied on Holinshed for his stories, and someone had just now proved it by a textual analysis. Well, okay, Chainmail isn't Shakespeare. But you get the idea. Shakespeare didn't "swipe" Holinshed, he built on that narrative and other influences to make something new and amazing. Everything is a remix. But that makes discovering what got remixed exactly all the more important.
