Lo, these many years, I have searched in vain…

…until now. At long last, I think I’ve found it. The book I read as a kid and could never remember its title.

At first I thought it was The Sleeping Dragon.

Then Quag Keep.

Then The Twilight Realm.

Then Demons Don’t Dream.

But none were right. I remembered the book was about a group of young people sucked into a role-playing game, but with each foray into these old 1970s/80s paperbacks, I grew less and less confident that I would find the right book, the one from my faded and unreliable memories.

I knew it had a blue cover.

I knew it had people from our world transported into a fantasy game.*

I knew it had to be from the late eighties or early nineties because I read it when I was roughly ten or eleven.

And I knew that it had seemed a bit too “old” for me at the time. Like, I remember the choices of the characters and the conflicts making me feel somewhat uncomfortable at times. I don’t know if it was relationship/sex-type stuff, or just moral grayness, but I remember keeping my reading on the QT. Or maybe I was embarrassed by the role-playing aspect, something I wasn’t sure my parents would approve of…

But over the years, as I’ve Googled what I could remember and crawled through message boards and blog posts, I simply couldn’t find the right book.

Honestly, I figured it must have been one of the aforementioned books and my memories were just faulty or making shit up.

And yet… the niggling feeling in the back of brain wouldn’t go away. I still wanted to know… still wanted to find the book…

Reader, I think I’ve found it.

I’m not sure why my morning scroll through Pinterest looking for old Dragon Magazine covers and fairy tale fantasy illustrations made me think of this book again, or my quest to find it, but I decided to do another round of Google searches and see what might come up.

The keywords were the usual: “portal fantasy,” “role-playing game,” “dice magic,” “1980s,” and yet, for whatever reason, this time, I lighted upon an rpg message board where someone had asked a similar question: Looking for a book… kids transported into a game… can’t remember the title… etc.

I scrolled through the thread. Same old, same old. Quag Keep. The Sleeping Dragon.

And then. Could it be this series by Kevin J. Anderson? Gamearth series? Gamearth, Game Play, Game’s End?

As soon as I saw the title, Game Play, it was like a little chink in my stone wall plunked out, and then the whole edifice crumbled.

Game Play.

I looked it up.

Blue cover.

An RPG that comes to life.

Kids from our world.

Came out in 1989. I would’ve been eight. Maybe nine when I encountered it.

And that cover. It gave me the shivers. Familiar and strange. Like deja vu or a memory or a dream.

*Apparently, my memory is a little faulty because I’m not sure the kids from our world go INTO the game, but instead, the game comes to life. But everything else from the book description sounds bang on. Even the names–Melanie, David, Hexworld–sound right.

A memory conjured from a darkened abyss. Hexworld. Game Play. The blue cover.

I have to find a copy now and read it. Anderson has republished the series but with revisions, so I don’t want to read the newer version. I want the old 1989 one. The one from my childhood.

I am almost 100% certain it will not live up to my memory of it. I don’t even think I liked it as a kid, only that it captivated and intrigued me. It felt weirdly forbidden when I was ten (eight? nine?). I know it will not seem so forbidden or “adult” now to the real-adult me, but I don’t care. I have to find a copy and read it.

I think, at long last, I have found the forgotten book. My quest is nearly complete.

Just goes to show what a fantasy novel, even a probably so-so fantasy novel, can mean to a kid.