The main set of songs can be traced back to The Man Who Stepped Into Yesterday (or TMWSIY), the senior project of guitarist and primary vocalist Trey Anastasio, written while he attended Goddard College.
He then wrote a separate set of songs that would make sense of the poem and turn it into a narrative driven musical for his senior project.
Forbin is a naïve, love-stricken man, and Tela is a streetwise experienced woman who understands the ways of the world better than most others in the play, save Icculus, the author of the Helping Friendly Book.
Maybe it's just a stage, and maybe I'll learn someday that the world really is black and white, good vs. evil, a simple place to live and make choices.
"[2] It's possible Trey did indeed change his mind on the dark and cynical turn the story takes at the end as Possum was dropped from live performances of TMWSIY after 1990.
These endings are a bit more optimistic than the original, even though Errand still winds up replacing Wilson as the new dictator and the cycle of war continues.
This seems like the happiest ending of them all until it is revealed that Icculus's mountain is an active volcano and it erupts underneath the Lizards just as they are celebrating their victory.
In the years after the original The Man Who Stepped Into Yesterday tape was recorded other songs were written that were connected to the Gamehendge story in some way.
The songs from Gamehendge have been played many times throughout the career of Phish, sometimes with Anastasio narrating parts of the story to the audience.
Another common sequence at shows from 1988 to 1995, and less frequently after, was to play Colonel Forbin's Ascent segueing into Fly Famous Mockingbird, often with an Anastasio monologue sandwiched in between.
In this version Wilson is never killed and the story ends with a volcano eruption soon after The Famous Mockingbird retrieves the Helping Friendly Book.