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Comment by jasonv | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone remember a Wired (?) story from the earliest days about a teenager who got mixed up in a geek subculture and disappeared into sewers under the city? A quick search on their site didn't really yield what I think I remember.

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> disappeared into sewers under the city

This might interest you: I watched the quite disturbing documentary "Dark Days" a few years ago about homeless people living in subway and sewage tunnels under New York. They had built small apartments down there and even had electricity.

Here are the first 10 minutes on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dh4s78Db5OQ

there's an excellent book about this called Mole People by Jennifer Toth.

Suddenly Futurama is a little bit less funny for me.

This rings a bell. I remember reading a book that sounds like this, some 35 years ago... It was my gateway to discover The Hobbit, since one sentence in this book (which wasn't that good) mentioned these geeks getting together to play "Tolkian" (maybe "Tolkienian") games. It may have been this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dungeon_Master

Perhaps its about the DnD kid? I vaguely remember hearing about that, in the early days of DnD there was a college kid in Michigan who disappeared, and it was thought he had been in the steam tunnels under the campus as part of a DnD campaign or something. I don't remember all of the details, or if it ended up being true, but I think it kind of became a trope surrounding DnD for a while, and there was a Tom Hanks movie about it.

> I don’t remember all of the details, or if it ended up being true

Not as far as any link between the disappearance and D&D, no:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Dallas_Egbert_III#Disapp...

> and there was a Tom Hanks movie about it.

Mazes and Monsters, the novel and the movie, were inspired by the (false) story of the event.

Thanks! This sounds like what I had in mind.

Had no idea the movie even existed.

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