Crowther, who also had a hand in developing the internet precursor ARPANET, drew inspiration from his own experiences as a caver. Perhaps the biggest influence on Kentucky Route Zero’s choice of setting was William Crowther’s Colossal Cave Adventure, originally released in 1976. But “ is a real place and all three of us always tried to respect it as a real place.” It’s the titular Zero, an underground highway (lowway?), defying all conventional mapping or prospects of “accuracy,” that serves as one of several of the game’s analogues for the Mammoth Cave System. “There are some distortions in the space a lot of different time periods happening at once,” Elliott said. The map in Act I shows Interstate Highway 65 and other roadways laid out relatively accurately to their real-world bluegrass counterparts. “Because tragedy is pretty classically about human nobility.” “And also, the game is a tragedy, but I don’t think that necessarily means it’s a sad story or that it’s a story that has a negative view on human life,” Elliott said. The quest that follows weaves through obsolete technology, geological marvels, dingy dive bars, mystic bureaucracy, and the fallout from financial downturn. They collect more offbeat companions along the way, each motivated by their own personal reasons for joining this trek into the unknown. It’s a text-heavy narrative adventure game that follows a delivery driver and a TV repairwoman as they travel in search of a location that may not physically exist. If you’re not familiar, Kentucky Route Zero is set in a magical realist version of Mammoth Cave and the surrounding region. “And pretty early on we knew that the duration of each act was going to vary in order to better divide the story into cohesive segments where each was able to focus on a particular theme or two.” That each act “varies” is perhaps an understatement, especially if you factor in the experimental nature of the between-act interlude segments. “We’ve always had an outline from the beginning that tracked the overall shape of the story,” he wrote. Later, over email, Kemenczy offered his own reflection on the game’s protracted development. “We’ve been really lucky, really fortunate, whatever the mechanism has been, to have been able to work on something so idiosyncratic at our own pace for so long,” Elliot reflected. Kentucky Route Zero finally saw its full release on consoles and PC this past January, concluding the anomalous, 10-year-long development journey. The game launched with the first of five acts in 2013, and the initial plan was to release the remaining four over the following year. Elliott, along with Tamas Kemenczy and Ben Babbitt, make up Cardboard Computer, the team that had been creating the narrative adventure game Kentucky Route Zero for the past decade. I had met Elliott in Mammoth Cave National Park’s visitor center 15 minutes before our guided tour was scheduled to begin. All told, it’s a spectacular setting, full of mystery and rich with metaphor for an enterprising storyteller to indulge. Still, at times I had to crouch and sidestep to accommodate the stony contours, though that sounded more comfortable than the Wild Cave tour, which requires visitors to actually crawl through crevices for the better part of three hours. Many of the larger paths are referred to as “avenues” due to their impressive scale, which reminded me of Washington, DC’s barrel-vaulted metro system architecture-if it had been created by 10 million years of erosion. Together with game developer and fellow Kentucky resident Jake Elliott, I descended a few dozen stairs into the gaping maw of the “historic entrance.” The ensuing passages varied in size and shape, but they all served to make me feel diminutive by comparison, like a benign parasite in the petrified guts of the Commonwealth. The first thing that stood out to me about Mammoth Cave was, perhaps appropriately, the enormousness of it. It’s one thing to travel a path laid out for you as a semi-passive observer, but I imagine it’s quite another to chart the course through the murk toward a destination unknown. The surrounding void gave way, in passing, to hint at dozens of enticing tributaries some only extended into shallow alcoves, but others undoubtedly breached into worlds heretofore unknown. A sporadically lit path gently repelled the perfect darkness all around. We were in a maze of twisty little passages.
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