It took a year to sell the first thousand Dungeons & Dragons booklets. But as word got out, demand soared and better new versions were published. In 1977, TSR sold over half a million dollars of game books. Two years later, sales grew to two million dollars. Eventually their sales climbed as high as forty million dollars a year!

D&D became especially popular with college students. The new game quickly spread to schools across the nation. That’s where the trouble began.

Mysterious Disappearance

One day in 1979, a 16-year old student named James Dallas Egbert went missing from Michigan State University. It was a sad story with a tragic ending. Egbert’s disappearance soon made headlines across the country—and convinced many readers that D&D was dangerous.

Egbert’s parents were beside themselves with worry. Desperate, they hired a private detective named William Dear to find their missing son. Dear hurried to the school with an entire team of investigators. Their search equipment included an airplane. They spent weeks on the case.

Dear is a colorful character who seems to love media attention. He has boasted that he is a “real life James Bond” who runs the “most successful and lucrative private investigative business in the nation.” His website boasts about his media appearances, including an infamous “alien autopsy” TV special that turned out to be a hoax.

When Dear talked to students who knew Egbert, he learned that the missing boy had played D&D. He was told that some students had invented a version where they acted out the roles of their characters in service tunnels beneath the school. D&D was still new. Dear had never heard of it before. In a wild guess based on nothing, Dear formed a “hunch” that Egbert’s disappearance was related to the game. He speculated that