Mazes and Monsters

• 1. Introduction

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  Mazes and Monsters, the 1982 television film, ends with Tom Hanks's character permanently convinced that he is a cleric named Pardieu. Directed by Steven Hilliard Stern, the film gave Hanks his first lead acting role. Its roots lie not in a screenwriter's imagination but in a chain of distorted retellings. A missing student, a private investigator, and a novelist each played a role in shaping what audiences saw on screen. How the story traveled from a university campus in 1979 to American living rooms in 1982 is a question with several unexpected answers.

• 2. A Case Badly Misread

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  James Dallas Egbert III disappeared from Michigan State University in 1979. The early coverage of his case landed on a detail that proved irresistible: Egbert played Dungeons and Dragons. Reporters speculated that the hobby might have played a role in his disappearance. That speculation spread through the national press and shaped public understanding of role-playing games for years.

  William Dear was the private investigator hired to look into the case. By 1984, he had written a book called The Dungeon Master. In it, Dear explained what had actually happened and why the gaming angle was wrong. His corrections arrived too late to change the conversation. Rona Jaffe had published her version of the story in 1981, three years before Dear's book appeared.

• 3. Fiction Accepted as Fact

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  Jaffe had no direct knowledge of role-playing games when she wrote the novel. Many of her readers were in the same position. They had no framework against which to test her account, so they accepted it as a plausible depiction of the hobby. The novel reached them during a period of genuine public uncertainty about role-playing games as a new pastime. For those readers, Jaffe's account was the only one they had.

  In 1985, Thomas Radecki of the National Coalition on Television Violence claimed to have proof that Dungeons and Dragons had caused the deaths of gamers. Radecki was a psychiatrist and anti-television violence activist. His evidence was a letter. That letter had been written not by a gamer or a researcher but by a fictional character inside Jaffe's novel. The film's four central characters would carry those same assumptions forward, against a background of private damage that had nothing to do with any game.

• 4. Private Damage

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  Jay-Jay, played by Chris Makepeace, is pushed to the margins by his mother. She cannot settle on a look for his room and redecorates it constantly. His response is to wear a rotating set of unusual hats, a visible act of self-definition in a domestic space that keeps changing around him. Kate, played by Wendy Crewson, carries the absence of her father and a string of failed relationships behind her. Daniel, played by David Wysocki, wants to design video games. His parents will not take that ambition seriously.

  Robbie's history is darker. His mother drinks. His father is strict. His brother, Hall, disappeared under circumstances that were never explained, and Robbie has been living with that grief ever since. He was also expelled from his previous school after becoming too consumed by the game of Mazes and Monsters. He comes to the new university reluctant to play again. His three friends persuade him. Through the early weeks of the game, Robbie and Kate begin a romantic relationship, and he tells her about his nightmares concerning Hall. Jay-Jay will be the one to move the game into a condemned cavern that none of them should have entered.

• 5. Pardieu

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  Jay-Jay's route to the cavern began with something no one expected from him: he had gone there to end his life. Once there, he reconsidered. He decided instead that the cavern would make an ideal setting for a new campaign of Mazes and Monsters. He ended his character's story in the game, which forced the others to restart the campaign. He described the new version as an opportunity to live out their fantasy in a real setting and proposed that they spelunk the cavern as part of it. His friends warned against it. They agreed anyway.

  During the trip underground, Robbie's sense of reality collapsed. He hallucinated that he had killed a creature called a Gorvil. From that moment forward, he believed himself to be Pardieu. He broke off his relationship with Kate on the grounds that his character observed celibacy. He began drawing maps toward a sacred destination he called the Great Hall. In his dreams, the Great Hall directed him to something called the Two Towers, and he disappeared.

  Robbie traveled to New York City, where he stabbed a mugger he believed to be a monster. Seeing blood on his knife and his own reflection in a window, he briefly returned to himself and called Kate from a payphone. His friends worked out that his Two Towers matched a pair of real buildings: the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. They found him in the South Tower lobby. He reached the observation deck before anyone could stop him. There he prepared to jump, certain that he could fly if he cast the right spell. His three friends pulled him back by meeting him within the logic of the game.

  Kate's final words are: "And so... we played the game again... for one last time." Robbie ends the story in counseling at his parents' home, still believing himself to be Pardieu. Each morning, a coin appears in his character's pouch as if by magic. His friends decide to sustain the fiction. Critics who reviewed the film would find in that ending something that went well beyond the question of role-playing games.

• 6. What Critics Found

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  The New York Times praised the younger cast for carrying the film with "remarkable skill." It noted that the plot "takes some startling turns." The review found in it what it called a broader "rites-of-passage" experience than most viewers would have expected. The Los Angeles Times called the film "impressive."

  The film suggests that Robbie's crisis has psychiatric roots, possibly a form of schizophrenia. The game, in that reading, accelerates something already present in the character rather than causing it. That distinction is visible in the film itself, even if audiences primed by a cultural panic were unlikely to register it.

  On the 19th of September 2022, Plumeria Pictures released the film on Blu-ray for the first time. It was a 40th-anniversary release and the film's first high-definition presentation. The release marks forty years of the film serving as a record of a cultural panic that its creators helped sustain.