Hacker Cinema
Mazes and Monsters
1982 · Film · 100 min
Directed by Steven Hilliard Stern
Bound together by a desire to play "Mazes and Monsters," Robbie and his four college classmates decide to move the board game into the local cavern. Robbie loses his mind, and the line between reality and fantasy fuse into a harrowing nightmare.
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12 comments on Hacker News
This is like a reboot of "Mazes and Monsters" [0] forty years later.
0. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084314/
1. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084314/mediaviewer/rm1883108353/?ref_=tt_md_6
The 1982 Tom Hanks movie of that name was based on the 1981 novel by Rona Jaffe!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazes_and_Monsters_(novel)
> I don’t remember all of the details, or if it ended up being true
Not as far as any link between the disappearance and D&D, no:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Dallas_Egbert_III#Disappearance
> and there was a Tom Hanks movie about it.
Mazes and Monsters, the novel and the movie, were inspired by the (false) story of the event.
I remember Tom Hanks starring in some made for TV movie Mazes and Monsters - he was a college student who went CRAZY playing D&D. The game was going to brain wash you so you couldn't tell the difference between fantasy and reality.
A year later there was a Saturday morning cartoon... It was a confusing time to be an 11 year old.
There's no comparison because it's now near-universally recognized that the moral panic on those topics was silly. But many people in the 80s were pretty convinced that heavy metal and fantasy role playing could drive you insane or make you start worshipping demons. It was the subject of Tom Hanks's first movie! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazes_and_Monsters)
>This misunderstanding arose only five months after TSR obtained widespread notoriety in a similar confusion surrounding the disappearance of college student James Dallas Egbert III in East Lansing, Michigan. A private detective hired to find Egbert had learned that the young man played TSR’s role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons—at the time virtually unknown to mainstream America—and hypothesized that Egbert had come to believe the game was real. Famously, this led to calls for a search of the college steam tunnels, where presumably Egbert would be found wandering in a deluded stupor, questing for monsters and treasure.
Tom Hanks starred in a 1982 made for TV movie called, "Mazes and Monsters" that used virtually this exact plot. In the 80s there was a massive hysteria about Dungeons & Dragons being linked to "devil worship" and other madness (yes really). It was so bad that TSR pulled Demons and Devils from the (then) new edition of the Monster Manual (and related books) in an attempt to quell the furor.
Spoiler: In the movie the character played by Hanks actually does go crazy and end up lost in the tunnels. He is eventually found but he has forever lost his mind, driven insane by the evil game.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084314/
I'm surprised they left out the "made for tv" movie Mazes and Monsters that starred Tom Hanks. The movie paralleled the story of James Dallas Egbert III, the missing college student.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazes_and_Monsters
As illustrated in the well known documentary "Mazes and Monsters" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpcL-fQNPfQ
> At the end of the 1982 TV movie “Mazes and Monsters,” a troubled gamer, played by a pre-fame Tom Hanks, loses touch and starts to believe that he really does live beside an evil wood in need of heroes.
Man, I have seen that movie. Having spent a good part of my youth playing AD&D, I did not know whether to laugh at it or yell at it angrily. Either way, it sucked really, really hard.
Interesting the article references the disappearance of James Dallas Egbert III but makes no mention of the tv show that aired on CBS in 1982 that was based on this incident.
I thought it was one of Tom Hanks better performances. [/sarcasm]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazes_and_Monsters
There is a good made-for-TV movie starring a young Tom Hanks, called "Mazes and Monsters" (1982) that was probably made because of the hype:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084314/
Looks like you can watch it here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awTKqydci_c
It was more than a fringe phenomenon. There was even a movie based on this train of thought, starring a now fairly respectable actor.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazes_and_Monsters
Like the book on which it is based, the film treats the playing of roleplaying games as indicative of deep neurotic needs. At least one protagonist is (or at least appears to be) suffering from schizophrenia (or some analogous condition) and in the end, the attainment of mature adulthood by others players is accompanied by the abandonment of role-playing games.