I just fought my way up a wind tunnel, scrambled through a ventilation duct, clambered across 40 yards of rope netting, rolled under a fence, and burrowed through a mass of grapefruit-sized plastic spheres. Now I’m facing two doors. One leads to freedom. The other to a room with something nasty in it, possibly involving torture.
I’ve got a full sweat going, my pulse is hammering, and the countdown on my wrist-mounted navigation unit tells me I’m running out of time. Minutes ago, a pictogram flashed up at me on a video monitor. Now I have to match it to one of a dozen symbols on a column between the two doors. Pick the correct one and I’m free. Mess up and I’m toast. I make my choice. Bzzzt. The door to my right swings open to reveal a large chair bristling with wires and leather straps.
Until this moment, I thought I had mastered La Fuga.
This medieval-looking electric chair sits deep inside an old bank in Madrid. The building has been remodeled to house La Fuga, a real-life role-playing game. Think of La Fuga (The Escape) as a $20 million cross between Halo and laser tag. The goal is simple: Decipher visual riddles to navigate and escape Mazzina, a high tech prison.
The company behind La Fuga is called Négone. It was founded by a sister-and-brother team, network engineer Silvia Garcia Alonso and former investment banker Jorge, who owned a piece of a dotcom that sold to Yahoo! for $400 million. They put their share of the money into live immersive gaming, starting Négone in 2002 and opening La Fuga last October. "There were lots of advances in in-home entertainment," Silvia says, "but in real-world entertainment, there was nothing happening."
A standard first-person shooter was one option, but the duo wanted something more cinematic. "There are certain plots that work again and again," Silvia says. "Finding treasure, a robbery, a big escape. The idea I think we all have when we see these movies is that it would be great to be the main character."
Creating the game presented both physical and intellectual challenges: They needed to erect a maze of steel and exposed concrete, and they needed to build a database to track the progress of each player through the labyrinth. Négone’s coders didn’t have to worry about writing the sort of physics-simulation software used in videogames, but Silvia says the logic engine - which keeps track of who’s where in the building and what they’re doing - gave her fits. "For video RPGs, you can use an off-the-shelf game engine, the way EA or Id does," she says. "But there’s nothing that could handle all the kinds of data we need to use, so we had to build it ourselves." Now that the Madrid facility is operational, the company is focusing on opening a game center in Manhattan early next year - with plans for 60 more worldwide in the next decade.
I pay 15 euros, set up an account, and receive a navigational unit with a networked PDA and an RFID chip that I strap to my forearm. The chip tracks my progress through the prison.
I have three lives - three incorrect test answers - before the system will spit me back into the lobby. A kiosk scans the RFID chip in my wrist unit, and I head down a set of stairs and through a dark passageway into a room lined with steel. From a 17-inch flatéscreen, a severe-looking woman with slicked-back hair tells me I’ve been assigned for reprogramming. Everything’s in Spanish. I’m accompanied by a translator, but I need no help getting the gist: Resistance is futile.
The screen goes static and then switches to a view of a sweaty prisoner with a 5 o’clock shadow who tells me that I can liberate myself and all the other drones stuck in the prison. Those who have escaped before me will contact me to assist in my quest. The door opens, and I enter a sort of closet before another door opens to reveal a metal air duct. I try to step in, but I slip, fall hard on my ass, and slide down the chute into a room containing a baggage carousel surrounded by screens.
One monitor displays another female executive type extolling the virtues of the prison’s reeducation system. I hold my wrist unit to the screen; up pops a member of the resistance, Lieutenant Gunderson, a sultry young woman wearing a combat helmet who claims to be my hacker guide. Between come-hither looks, she tells me I’ll need a circuit-welding tool to get to the next level. I can’t decide whether she’s trying to help me or seduce me. But I need to stay focused. To get the tool, I have to solve a puzzle.
I’m shown four pictures, only one of which contains a pair of perfectly parallel lines. I have 30 seconds to choose the correct one. As the time ticks away, I push a button on my wrist unit: C. Bingo. A circuit-welder icon lights up on my screen.
I reach another door, which opens into another dark room crisscrossed by a maze of metal grates and mirrors, with more mirrors overhead. Gunderson appears on a ceiling-mounted screen, telling me I need a cloak of invisibility. Metal-and-glass-encased RFID readers are scattered throughout the room, each encircled by pulsing yellow LEDs. I hold my wrist unit next to one just to see what happens. Two hundred bonus points! I successfully answer another question, identifying the longest of four tangents extending from a circle. I get the cloak. Gunderson casts more sexy glances in my direction, and a map on the monitor guides me to the doorway out of the labyrinth.
I head up a set of stairs into a room filled with dance-floor fog pierced by red laser beams. I feel like Ethan Hunt in Mission: Impossible. A couple of other players are making their way between beams, contorting themselves and sliding along the floor. My invisibility cloak hides me from the lasers, and I move through the room quickly. I solve another puzzle; a door opens into the library. While most of the rooms are concrete and metal, straight out of Doom, the library is pure Ian Schrager: glowing glass walls with a cluster of monitors in the center. A code flashes up on one of them. Each wall is backlit in blue, orange, or white and contains book-shaped glass bricks. There’s a code on each brick. I need to find the matching sequence among the dozens of bricks. I get it and move on.
One final room. The outside walls are lined with monitors, and a smaller glass chamber juts out from the far wall. Another puzzle opens another door, revealing several monitors mounted in a column like totems on a pole. There’s a door to my right and to my left. Gunderson tells me I’m almost free. A screen flashes a complicated pictogram. I have to pick the matching one from a dozen similar tiles in various places on the pole. I press a button beneath one of the choices, and it’s over - I’ve won. Back in the Négone lobby, I’m presented with a commemorative mug. It’s almost too easy.
I take a walk to Négone headquarters and size up my score - 38,000 - on the company’s Web site. Respectable, but the single-round record is more than 50,000. Either I need to start hunting down more of those little bonus-point boxes or there’s a better way to do it.
The second time I play, Négone’s system knows that I’ve mastered a basic version, so it sends me on a course that’s more physically challenging. The system drives up my pulse rate just before I have to take the tests - by sending me up a flight of steep stairs, for example, or into a wind tunnel. This makes it much harder to concentrate on the puzzles. I reach the final glass chamber with two mistakes, and I think I might be able to pull off another win. Wrong. The right hand door opens to reveal the electric chair, and I’m shown the exit. It dawns on me that my initial run was Négone’s version of the bunny slope.
Next stop: Times Square. Will Négone’s planned 30,000-square-foot game center at 49th and Broadway appeal to US gamers? Today’s videogame graphics and story lines are so sophisticated that aspects of La Fuga seem a bit canned and low-budget by comparison. La Fuga may be shooting for Halo’s apocalyptic look, but the emphasis on discovery and puzzle-solving makes the experience flow more like Myst. The overwrought video clips smack of a bad telenovella. On top of that, the game’s most compelling aspect - its physicality - could be too much for gamers used to moving only their thumbs.
But climbing ropes, tunneling through a roomful of plastic spheres, and squeezing through air ducts (just like in Aliens) can be pretty damn exciting - even without the rocket launchers, railguns, and frag grenades you get in the typical RPG. Maybe Négone’s games will appeal to parents trying to get their Gen Y progeny out of the living room for a bit of exercise.
Even though I’ve never seen anything like it, the game somehow seems familiar. Then, on the flight home, it hits me: Eight years ago I went on a hardcore Doom jag for a few months and started having dreams that took place inside the game. That’s what playing La Fuga feels like. It’s a fully realized dream sequence. One thing I’m painfully aware of during my 13-hour plane ride: Falling down in a real-world game definitely leaves a real-world bruise.
Contributing editor Josh McHugh (joshmchugh.net) wrote about recycled dotcoms in issue 14.02.
credit Négone
Part obstacle course, part videogame, La Fuga tests your brains and brawn.
credit Négone
Get past the rope netting and you face monkey bars and laser beams.
credit Négone
Find the glass brick with the correct code to move on to the next task.
