The Life Fantastic by Noa Menhaim

Author:Noa Menhaim [Menhaim, Noa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786786692
Publisher: Watkins Media
Published: 2022-09-15T05:00:00+00:00

18

A RAT IN A MAZE

When he was 12, James Dallas Egbert III was asked to repair US Air Force computers; when he was 15, he enrolled in Michigan University and began his studies in computer science. About a year later, on 15 August 1979, he disappeared from his room in the dorms, leaving behind a suicide note and a cork board on which he had stuck 38 pins in a complex pattern. The family hired a private investigator who discovered that Egbert had been an enthusiastic participant in the popular role-playing game “Dungeons and Dragons” or “D&D”. The investigator believed that a pattern formed by the pins was a map that would reveal the mystery of Egbert’s whereabouts. The young man had used the pins to represent an underground labyrinth, a network of steam tunnels under the university buildings crisscrossing the campus in which he had been playing a “live” version of his favourite game with other students, which seemed eventually to have swallowed him whole.

The private investigator was right, but only in part. Egbert was a genius, but he was profoundly miserable. Hounded by his parents’ impossible expectations, the high demands of academia and his confused sexuality, he began using his knowledge of chemistry to produce drugs that turned out to exacerbate his depression. He descended into the tunnels and hid, with a supply of milk, cheese, crackers, pot and sleeping pills. He took the pills. When his suicide attempt failed, he called the private investigator and turned himself in. It was a lot less sexy than “Youth Vanishes in Labyrinth Because of a Role-Playing Game.”

The seeds of “Dungeons and Dragons” were sown during a fateful meeting at a conference at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin in 1972 between Dave Arenson, a writer and game developer, and Gary Gygax, an insurance agent who loved war games. It is difficult to overstate the impact of “D&D” on both the fantasy genre and the gaming industry. There had been role-playing games before, of course, but this game’s structure offered unparallelled immersive possibilities. Immensely popular, it taught generations of gamers how to spin a plot and tell a story. It gave amateurs new liberties within their preferred genres, as well as the power to take active part in their favourite stories and join a world of imagination. Role-playing games formed the basis of the largest and most lucrative entertainment industry today – video, console and computer games.

Rising from 500,000 sales in 1977 when it was launched to 2,300,000 the year Egbert vanished, the sales of D&D reached 22,000,000 by 1982.

Egbert’s disappearance may not have been a game-changer but it definitely had an effect.

One especially efficient writer took two weeks to produce a novel loosely based on his story, entitled Mazes and Monsters, which was turned into a TV movie starring Tom Hanks in his first role. An urban legend was born, mass hysteria was unleashed.

“Dungeons and Dragons” was the enemy. A Texan mother whose son shot himself, argued that a curse the dungeon master had put on him in the game was real, and sued TSR Inc.

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