When you die in this game, you won't die in real life--but your computer might. Come on a journey back to the time a D&D game was destroying OSes.
In 2006, director William Brent Bell released a movie about playing House of the Dead starring Malcolm in the Middle, that gave us the immortal line: don't you get it? If you die in the game, you die for real.
While 2006's Stay Alive certainly isn't the first story to play around with that premise--indeed, it's a storyline that goes back to the early days of video games and the mid-seasons of the X-Files featuring episodes where if you die in the game, you die for real:
One day we'll have VR that makes us look this cool
...and that's an episode written by cyberpunk originator William Gibson. But if sunglasses and tanktop Fox Mulder and sci-fi badass Scully aren't enough to convince you of the trope, everyone from Star Trek the Next Generation to Sword Art Online have messed around with the idea that somehow, some way, a video game is going to end up killing you for real.
Bell of Lost Souls Staff Writer and DM, J.R. covers RPGs of all stripes and on occasion eats sandwiches. You can ask him about either at [email protected]
