In 1979, a Michigan State
student named James Dallas Egbert III disappeared from campus.
Egbert was a Dungeons & Dragons fan, and the media latched onto
speculations that he had died in the campus’ steam tunnels while
playing a live-action version of the game. A moral panic over
role-playing games was just getting underway, and the rhetoric
around the case tended toward the Gothic. “We’ve sat here many an
hour, all of us wondering—is Dallas the dungeon master,” a private
detective hired by Egbert’s family
said at one point. “Or if he isn’t the dungeon master, is there
some other dungeon master who has pulled all of us into this game
by using him as some sort of pawn?”
Such speculations turned out to be
untrue: Egbert had taken a bus to New Orleans, where he
attempted suicide for reasons unrelated to the game. (A year later,
he would succeed in killing himself.) But as the D&D panic
progressed in the early ’80s, the story became a sort of
half-remembered cautionary tale for parents nervous about this
strange new hobby. Rona Jaffe wrote a novel, Mazes
and Monsters, that was loosely inspired by the most lurid
accounts of the case. And in 1982, that book became a
made-for-TV movie. Vague recollections of the televised Mazes
and Monsters mixed with vague recollections of Egbert to form
a hazy folk memory: not a precise tale with names and dates, but a
legend about a guy who got lost or died or something because a game
had taken over his life.
I’ve embedded the movie below. The protagonists, a collection of
troubled college kids alienated in different ways from their
families, get drawn into a role-playing game the way characters in
other movies get drawn into drugs. (Indeed, the whole thing is
stuctured like an anti-drug picture.) One of the students—played by
a young Tom Hanks, whose only other notable credit at this point
was the sitcom Bosom Buddies—loses the distinction between
fantasy and reality, becoming convinced that he really is the
cleric he plays in the game. By the end of the picture (SPOILER
ALERT) he has stabbed a man, come close to killing himself, and
lost his original identity permanently. The film makes some small
attempts at balance, suggesting that the game can help less fragile
people work through their fears. But when the best you can say
about a pastime is that it’s potentially therapeutic but dangerous,
that’s ultimately just one more parallel with an anti-drug
film.
The script is clumsy even by ’80s TV-movie standards—when the
screenwriter wants to tell us that a character has an IQ of 190,
for instance, he does it by having the boy’s mom randomly mention
the fact while greeting him—and the acting is mostly awful. (Hanks
isn’t bad for most of the movie, at least in comparison to the rest
of the cast, but his performance goes over the top when his
character loses his mind.) If you don’t think you can sit through
the whole thing, jump to 1:07:10 for a particularly potent bit of
fearmongering dialogue. Then go to 1:32:19 to check out the
climax atop the World Trade Center, a scene that echoes those
urban
legends where LSD convinces people that they can fly.
Bonus link: That’s the secular version of the D&D
scare. For the Christian version, I give you Jack T.
Chick.
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