“I had concentrated so hard on evading dangers, trying to gather a fortune, and simply staying alive that for long periods I actually forgot where I was and became a magic-user in the perilous maze,” he wrote five years later in his published account of the case, titled The Dungeon Master. But Dear took it seriously and came away gravely convinced of the game’s immersive power. It’s amusing to picture: the imposing Texan private eye hunched over a table and rolling d20s, scribbling on the character sheet of a third-level magic-user he’d named Tor. Investigator William Dear wrote non-fiction account The Dungeon Master based on his search for James Dallas Egbert III, which later inspired Rona Jaffe's fictional Mazes and Monsters.Īs part of his investigation, Dear actually played Dungeons & Dragons himself, hiring an unnamed college dungeon master to run a scenario in his motel room. He looked terrible his clothes were a mess. “I remember one Sunday night, late, he came back to the dorm utterly exhausted, mentally and physically. “Dallas said you can make the game into anything you want.”Ĭoleman explained how Dallas and some other students like to “play it for real” down in the network of steam tunnels that stretched for miles beneath the college grounds. “This is a board game?” the nonplussed Dear asked a student named Karen Coleman, a friend of Dallas’ who didn’t play the RPG herself. But it was another revelation that hooked the investigator most deeply: Dallas played a game called Dungeons & Dragons. He also heavily used marijuana, cocaine and, according to one college friend, “some stuff he cooked up himself,” including PCP. He was bisexual, which Dear believed he had trouble coming to terms with. But it was another revelation that hooked the investigator most deeply: Dallas played a game called Dungeons & Dragons.ĭear quickly formed a picture of Dallas as a profoundly troubled, lonely young man the combination of burdensome parental expectation and the pressure-cooker atmosphere of college had left him riven with depression. After meeting with Dallas’ parents, Jim and Anna Egbert, at their home in Dayton, Ohio, he took the job.ĭear quickly formed a picture of Dallas as a profoundly troubled, lonely young man. But there was something about Dallas that drew him in, mainly the student’s young age Dear himself had an 11-year-old son. Having just returned from solving an extortion case in Tokyo, Dear was reluctant to take the case on. Could it be a map, the campus cops wondered? Why were several pins configured into the rough shape of a pistol? In his dorm room he’d left a short but troubling note: “To whom it may concern: should my body be found, I wish it to be cremated.” On his cork board he’d created an arcane arrangement of pushpins. Small-boned and looking much younger than his age, Egbert – known as Dallas – was a precocious high-achiever with a high IQ who was already a sophomore at the college, majoring in computer science. “My nephew has disappeared,” Gross told Dear.Ī week earlier, 16-year-old James Dallas Egbert III had vanished from the campus of Michigan State University. On August 22nd 1979, in Dallas, Texas, private detective William Dear received a call from a locally well-known surgeon named Dr. Mazes and Monsters was Tom Hanks' first major role, at the age of 26. Its own story is a narrative labyrinth, whose sharp twists and strange turns begin with real-life tragedy and end with a widespread media scare that was so intense it made the creators of D&D fear for their own safety.Ĭontent warning: this article includes discussion of suicide and depression. But Mazes and Monsters is far more than an embarrassing ‘before they were famous’ curio. The film is trashy, schmaltzy and so forgettable that Hanks himself has barely referred to it since. In the Canadian made-for-TV movie, the 26-year-old Hanks landed his first-ever leading role as freshman college student Robbie Wheeling, who becomes psychologically unhinged by a fictional, Dungeons & Dragons-like roleplaying game. Before Forrest Gump, before Turner & Hooch, before Bachelor Party even, there was 1982’s Mazes and Monsters. For Tom Hanks, it was hardly the most auspicious start to a movie career.
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