You current saves would still be fine after installing the patch. A couple of the fixes and changes only apply to new games, but the technical fixes, extra quick saves, etc work with existing saves.
In the German game version, the first patch introduced incompatibilities in the save format that required starting over, but the English version was released after that, so saved games will work fine in any later version.
The El' Gammon in the game was named after someone in the original forum, as were several other NPCs (Alrik Fassbauer, Arhu... Shrimpo and the guy looking for him were named after a couple guys with a gaming related TV show / web site).
