On August 15, 1979, 16-year-old James Dallas Egbert III left his dorm room at Michigan State University and disappeared. Feared kidnapped or dead, the efforts to locate the precocious genius lasted a month before he was inexplicably found 1000 miles away in a Louisiana coastal town few have heard of. During this time, his vanishing became a national story, was the source of endless media speculation which invented a national moral panic lasting a decade over a game sold at hobby shops which was weaved into a larger mythology said to involve the devil himself. Egbert’s tragic story inspired a sensationalized novel and subsequent TV movie adaptation airing in 1982, with this fictionalized narrative often conflated with or remembered instead of the more mundane version of events that really happened. This is the story of Mazes and Monsters.
