A Look At The Disappearance Of A Dungeons & Dragons Prodigy

Publish date: 2024-04-17

In the late 1970s, a group of students at Michigan State University regularly gathered to play "Dungeons & Dragons," which had just been invented a few years earlier. One of those players was James Dallas Egbert III, a 16-year-old college student considered a child prodigy for his technology and computer science skills. Though gifted, Egbert was also troubled, and, according to The Saturday Evening Post, left a suicide note before slipping out of his his dorm room the evening of August 15, 1979. In an instant, Egbert became a missing person.

Egbert's family hired a private investigator, William Dear, to find their son. Dear, who later wrote the book "The Dungeon Master: The Disappearance of James Dallas Egbert III," didn't fully understand the game, and he publicly suggested that there was a connection between Egbert's disappearance and his misunderstood hobby, according to the book "Shared Fantasy: Role Playing Games as Social Worlds." Dear's equating of the game with the teen's disappearance was widely reported in the media at the time.

As it turned out, however, Egbert was very much alive, having merely gone to a friend's house to hide out for a while. He would turn up again here and there over the next few years, before finally taking his own life on August 16, 1980.

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