"Catholic Man dies and finds out by Jesus Christ that Catholicism leads straight to Hell for eternity"

[Inquiry]

Mazes and Monsters. Although digging into it, it looks like it was less connected to Chick than I thought.

Basically, Chick is one of the more infamous elements of the paranoia about Dungeons and Dragons in the 70s and 80s. His depiction of the game has it leading kids to disassociate from reality and fall into satanism. Mazes and Monsters did something similar to that (focusing more on the disassociation and mental illness and less on the satanism) but it looks like it was based on a specific incident that arose out of the paranoia, and not the chick track, which came out afterwards.

 

[Tis_Bearself]

“Mazes and Monsters” was based on the real-life disappearance of James Dallas Egbert III from the Michigan State campus in 1979. I remember this quite well because I happened to be taking a summer “introduction to engineering” course for high schoolers at Michigan State the week it occurred, and it was front page news in all the papers and on TV. Egbert was some kind of boy genius who’d been sent to university there at age 16 and then disappeared. They thought maybe he got lost in the steam tunnels under the campus playing D&D. It turned out he was secretly gay and after a failed suicide attempt had run away from campus and hid out with some of his older gay friends. Had nothing to do with D&D.

 

[Gorgias]

“Mazes and Monsters” was based on the real-life disappearance of James Dallas Egbert III from the Michigan State campus in 1979.

I remember hearing about that – including the “steam tunnels” part! (I was an AD&D player way back then, and the news reports caused much eyerolling among myself and friends.) It did cause much parental angst, though…

I never heard the end of the story, though – thanks for that info!

 

[Tis_Bearself]

The end of the story is sad, unfortunately. Egbert was eventually located safe and sound, but a couple years later he committed suicide (which again had nothing to do with D&D).

I remember when I went to engg school in the early 80s, I was a bit nervous of the game due to all the negative publicity. All of my guy friends during freshman year played it, so I got to see it was benign (except one could easily waste so much time on it as to flunk out of school), but it was never my thing. When I met my husband, he had played it also and in fact would still play it once a year with his college buddies when they got together at Thanksgiving. I never played, I’d go read a book in the next room and leave him to his male bonding.

 

[CaptainPrudeman]

I’m in the middle of a D&D campaign right now. The closest I’ve ever gotten to anything occult was fake Tarot cards used to tell in-game fortunes because, y’know, it’s real in that universe. There’s no devil worshiping and I’m glad that idea is mostly extinct now.