How 'Dungeons & Dragons' Rose In Popularity Due To A Missing Teen And Cult Hysteria

In the summer of 1979, a week after the annual Gen Con, Michigan State University reported that one of their students, 16-year-old Dallas Egbert, had gone missing. The last time Egbert was spotted at his dormitory was a day before the tabletop game convention began. At the time, Dungeons & Dragons hadn’t gone mainstream yet, but it was already being picked up by college gamers as an exciting new favorite. 

So when investigators found a corkboard with metal tacks in Egbert’s room and his mother revealed that her son had recently learned of this new game about dungeons, the police and the media concluded that the board was actually a map to a real dungeon belonging to a secret D&D cult and that Egbert had left it there so they could find and save him from this evil cult who, we guess, worships dragons or something.

Craig Adderley/Pexels

Lord knows how many of those people would have suffered strokes if Harry Potter existed back then.

More specifically, the police stated that the locations of some of the tacks on Egbert’s board (that was just, like, a regular bulletin board with no actual map or anything) matched the locations of manhole covers on the university’s campus grounds, and that those covers would lead to steam tunnels where Egbert could possibly be found. Note that phrases used here like “some of the tacks” and “not an actual map” mean absolutely nothing because, sometimes, a coincidence simply means yes, there most definitely is a cult trying to resurrect an ancient dragon demon underneath a university. They just have to roll a six.

How 'Dungeons & Dragons' Rose In Popularity Due To A Missing Teen And Cult Hysteria
Source: Pinoy Daily News