The Most Dangerous Game

Fifty years on, Dungeons & Dragons has only grown more popular. But it continues to be misunderstood.

- Andrea Long Chu

IN THE SUMMER OF 1979, the New York Times reported that a 16-year-old student at Michigan State University named James Dallas Egbert III had gone missing while playing a "bizarre intellectual game." In his dorm room, campus police had discovered a suicide note as well as a corkboard covered in thumbtacks that seemed to map out the school's underground steam tunnels. From the boy's mother, police learned that Dallas had recently developed an interest in a game in which players assumed the roles of fantastical heroes who slew monsters and uncovered lost treasures through a combination of dice rolls and make-believe. The cops initially mistook the game for a local cult; in fact, it was published by a tiny company called Tactical Studies Rules, or TSR, operating out of a dilapidated hotel in Wisconsin. Before long, the Egbert family's private detective was speculating that the game had caused Dallas to "slip through the fragile barrier between reality and fantasy."

The reality was, as reality tends to be, less fantastic: Dallas had entered the tunnels meaning to kill himself with quaaludes. Having survived, he ran away to Louisiana, where he resurfaced a month later. At most, his interest in entering an imaginary world may have been an expression of the intense feelings of alienation that came with being a child prodigy and, apparently, a young gay man. (He committed suicide with a handgun the following year.) But the game, called Dungeons & Dragons, had already captured the imagination of an American public increasingly fearful of-and fascinated by-the prospect of brainwashing, organized cults, and devil worship. The religious right called the game evil. TSR couldn't keep up with demand.