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Mazes & Monsters: Are you kidding me.
Yes. Yes in fact we are.
It actually started as a joke. As its designer I was stumped for a name and emailing some ideas about with a couple of old friends when someone suggested Mazes & Monsters after the Tom Hanks cautionary tale about role playing games. I think they were trying to tell me something....
For those of you who haven't seen it, Mazes & Monsters is basically the Reefer Maddness of its age, a film so bad it actually makes you want to start gaming, worship satan, and kill off all your college roommates (not the theme of this RPG btw). As a gamer I started rolling the dice back in the autumn of '82 and quite vividly recall watching news footage of religious organizations holding public burnings of that certain other game that we all loved. So even as a sixth grader I was no stranger to the controversy, yet somehow the movie passed me by. I never saw it until just a few months after 9/11 when this matter of naming the world came about.
Perhaps it was too soon.
The film ends with Tom Hanks running around the Twin Trade Towers thinking they are the two towers from Tolkien's epic adventure and then threatening to jump off the top of them. Total flashback city. I sat there before the TV glassy eyed and dazed as if hit by a glancing blow. Forget the gaming aspect of it, just seeing such bright and clean footage of the Twin Trade Towers as they were back in the 1980's - it was like that scene in Kubrick's the Shining where the kid is riding his big wheel through the halls and comes upon a pair of girls simply standing there. One second they are just as calm and as placid as can be, the next second they have been hacked up with an axe with their blood sprayed all over the walls. Then they are whole again. That is exactly what I was seeing, having absolutely no problem superimposing my memories of that terrible day all over the screen.
I shut off the film and was almost totally overwhelmed by nostalgia for a simpler time when the most we had to fear were games involving pretend magic and heavy metal albums with backwards masked lyrics (here's one: strihs-t trecnoc erom yub). So quaint! So somewhat innocent! And it was at that moment that it stuck. Yeah - Mazes & Monsters - actually it sounds kinda bad-ass if you think about it. We'll keep it until someone forces the ToAd to do otherwise.
So there's no grand message here, so secret conspiratorial plot. Those of you who are still stung over the sad fate of James Dallas Egbert the third - I feel for you, but you got to admit it, that guy was pretty screwed up long before he ever got into gaming. Mazes & Monsters as the ToAd knows it is a simple, somewhat dorky, fantasy adventure game - and nothing more.
-JDM, 09/26/08.
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