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IT BEGINS WITH A FALL! You step through a door. And then you fall. There is a flash of vertigo and you land (thump!) on a bridge on a lonely road, in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere, dazed and confused, bruised and battered, next to a pool of blood.
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ysterious music plays in the background and words on the screen give you the basics: You don’t remember anything about the last day. You do remember your name, Alexander Blackwell. And you do remember you were on vacation “in beautiful Sanity Falls” with your wife, Livea. You also know she is now gone, abducted by someone, though you don’t remember who. You are almost immediately contacted by phone. If you want to see you wife again, you must collect a million dollars to buy her back. You will be given a series of clues on posters of your wife that are hidden around the environs. To find her wife, you must gather these clues and collect enough money to free her. In the meantime, Livea’s captors will continue “to play“with her. Her muffled sobs in the background of the call make it quite clear how these men “play.” Welcome to Sanity Falls, the inaugural production of MadPea Games, a company that exists both in SL and IRL. It’s a combination of a hunt and interactive suspense filled thriller it is the brainchild of MadPea, the founder is Kiana Writer.
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“I came up with the idea together with Zachh Barkley,” Writer explains. “We were working on a bigger game, but then the Alex [Blackwell] character started living his own life in my head and I decided that [his story] would make a truly interesting and unique hunt concept.” Once she roughed out her story, Writer brought in a team of designers to make it a reality, builders to create the terrain and the many structures on the sim, scripters, and sound designers, to create the spooky music, all working together to create a nourish virtual world within our virtual world. In all, 9 designers are credited with putting Sanity Falls together, and another 18 are given special thanks for their contributions. The result, a dark, threatening world. A world of deserted streets, decaying motels, and shadowy corners where anything could happen -- and probably has. Writer credits her team with most of final look, feel, and ambivalent ambiance of Sanity Falls Writer, who is a RL journalist, loves to create games in her second life. “I love the possibilities that SL offers,” she tells me.