# Mazes and Monsters - Event: Phenomenon - Date: 1981 (novel); 1982 (TV film) - Canonical: https://www.lanternhall.org/culture/mazes-and-monsters/ > Rona Jaffe's 1981 novel about college gamers lost in a fantasy game, and the 1982 CBS film that gave Tom Hanks his first lead role, fixed the image of the deluded, dangerous roleplayer in the public mind. **Why it matters:** Mazes and Monsters turned a false newspaper theory into a popular story. It became the pop-culture reference point of the anti-D&D panic, was cited as if it were evidence, and is now remembered chiefly as camp. ## Quick answers **What was Mazes and Monsters?** Rona Jaffe's 1981 novel about college gamers lost in a fantasy game, and the 1982 CBS film that gave Tom Hanks his first lead role, fixed the image of the deluded, dangerous roleplayer in the public mind. **When did Mazes and Monsters happen?** 1981 (novel); 1982 (TV film). **Why did Mazes and Monsters matter?** Mazes and Monsters turned a false newspaper theory into a popular story. It became the pop-culture reference point of the anti-D&D panic, was cited as if it were evidence, and is now remembered chiefly as camp. ## What happened In August 1979 newspapers across the United States ran versions of a story that was not true: that a teenage prodigy at Michigan State University, James Dallas Egbert III, had vanished into the steam tunnels beneath the campus while playing a live-action version of [*Dungeons & Dragons*](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/original-dungeons-and-dragons/). The theory had been floated by a private investigator who knew little about the game. Egbert, who was struggling with serious personal problems, was found alive weeks later; the game had played no part in his disappearance. But the image of students losing their minds in a fantasy labyrinth had already escaped into the culture (see [The Satanic Panic & D&D](https://www.lanternhall.org/culture/satanic-panic/)). The novelist Rona Jaffe, author of the bestselling *The Best of Everything* (1958), turned the image into fiction. *Mazes and Monsters*, published by Delacorte in September 1981, follows four troubled college students who play a D&D-like game of the same name. One of them, Robbie, drifts into a delusion in which he becomes his character, a cleric. Like another novel of the moment, *Hobgoblin*, it treated fantasy gaming as a symptom of deep neurotic need, with maturity arriving when the game is abandoned. CBS bought the television rights. The film, directed by Steven Hilliard Stern from a script by Tom Lazarus, premiered on December 28, 1982, with a 26-year-old Tom Hanks, then known for the sitcom *Bosom Buddies*, as Robbie Wheeling, in his first leading role. In a cavern where the friends stage a live game, Robbie has a psychotic break; he comes to believe he is the cleric Pardieu, runs off to New York, stabs a mugger he takes for a monster, and climbs to the observation deck of the World Trade Center, which he believes are the "Two Towers" of his visions, meaning to fly. His friends talk him down using the game's rules. The final scene leaves him lost in his fantasy, playing one last game with them at his parents' house. ## Why it mattered Neither book nor film was documentary, but many readers and viewers had no other picture of [roleplaying games](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/tabletop-rpg/). For them *Mazes and Monsters* was what the hobby looked like: alienated teenagers, blurred reality, caves and knives. The story arrived as anti-D&D campaigners were gathering strength, and it was used as ammunition. In 1985 psychiatrist Thomas Radecki of the National Coalition on Television Violence cited a letter written by a fictional character in Jaffe's novel as "proof" that the game had caused players' deaths. The film did carry some craft. *The New York Times* praised the young cast for carrying the story "with remarkable skill," and the *Los Angeles Times* called it "impressive." The fictional game, though, bore little resemblance to how D&D was actually played: its players wander real caverns in costume, while real players sat around a kitchen table with dice, pencils and graph paper. *[Dragon](https://www.lanternhall.org/culture/dragon-magazine/)* reviewed Jaffe's novel for its readers in 1983. Ironically, the notoriety helped the real game. The press storm around Egbert, which Jaffe's book prolonged, coincided with a boom in D&D sales: the Basic Set, selling perhaps 5,000 copies a month before the 1979 coverage, was reportedly selling more than 30,000 a month by the end of that year. ## Legacy As the panic faded, *Mazes and Monsters* became a cult object, enjoyed for its earnestness and for the sight of a future two-time Oscar winner as a gamer who thinks he is a holy man. It sits in a small genre of 1980s scare fiction about roleplaying, alongside the Canadian film *Skullduggery* (1983) and the steam-tunnel death in Neal Stephenson's satirical campus novel *The Big U* (1984), and it is the most remembered of them. William Dear, the investigator in the Egbert case, set out what had really happened in his 1984 book *The Dungeon Master*, rejecting the D&D connection. The film has stayed in circulation on VHS, DVD and streaming, and in September 2022 a 40th-anniversary Blu-ray gave it its first high-definition release. Later works such as [*Stranger Things*](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/stranger-things/) replay the same era with the sympathies reversed: the kids at the table are the heroes, and the panic is the monster. ## Facts - Rona Jaffe's novel was published by Delacorte in September 1981; it drew on inaccurate press accounts of the 1979 disappearance of Michigan State student James Dallas Egbert III. - The TV film premiered on CBS on December 28, 1982, directed by Steven Hilliard Stern from a script by Tom Lazarus. - Tom Hanks, then 26 and best known for the sitcom *Bosom Buddies*, played Robbie Wheeling, a student who comes to believe he is his cleric character, Pardieu. - The film's climax was shot at the World Trade Center, which Robbie mistakes for the "Two Towers" of his visions. - In 1985 psychiatrist Thomas Radecki cited a fictional letter from a character in the novel as "proof" that D&D had killed players. - *Dragon* magazine reviewed Jaffe's novel in its July 1983 issue (#75), alongside another anti-gaming novel, *Hobgoblin*. - A 40th-anniversary Blu-ray, the film's first high-definition release, appeared in September 2022. ## Sources and further reading - [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazes_and_Monsters) - [Wikipedia: Mazes and Monsters (novel)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazes_and_Monsters_(novel)) - [IMDb](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084314/) --- From The Lantern Hall (https://www.lanternhall.org/), a museum of fantasy literature and roleplaying games.