Monday, January 10, 2011

Airlock

When the game starts, you're alone in a bunker. You'd cross off another day on the calendar and start to check your gear. You prepare to leave for the nearest town; you strap on your gas mask and pull up your hood. The green light on your oxygen gauge tells you that you'll be able to survive in the airless environment outside. The world was brought to a complete standstill when the air started dissipating. 

Most didn't know what was happening before it was too late. It wasn't how humanity had figured it would end. All in all, it was a very silent, quick affair without the big explosions or the screaming masses fleeing. In fact, no one could have imagined a quieter apocalypse. People simply fell where they stood or sat at the time. There wasn't time to evacuate, and where would have people gone anyway? Those who survived were the people who had planned ahead, who had planned for the impossible. Their reward was solitude on a lifeless, airless planet. But at least there's plenty of time to think and reflect.

The end happened so quickly that the destruction was limited. You  have entire cities open to exploration and treasure hunting. Only...you have to watch your air gauge. The air gauge itself is on your suit/clothes and not on your UI, so you have to look down to see it. If you forget it, you might end up fucked unless you can somehow find air.

You move around empty schoolyard, apartment buildings, and skyscrapers. The lack of air preserved the billions of bodies worldwide relatively longer than they otherwise would have been, and now the empty planet is a mausoleum of dried up human husks littering streets and buildings.

You'd have to scavenge for stuff to improve your gear so you could stay out longer. Through exploring, you might find other safe bunkers and you'll be able to move more freely. Then there'd be enemies. What would they be? Something that doesn't require air, which could stalk you and make you feel watched. A less open threat that might attack when you least suspect it. And would there be others?

Maybe you'd have to find them first. Would you even go armed? No air would mean no sound, so all you'd have was the clicking of the gas mask and maybe whatever contemporary band you managed to put on that banged up, scavenged iPod you managed to find in the pocket of a body near the airport terminal. You'd have to consider getting fuel for the generator in your safehouse, as well.

Your only contact with other people would be someone who you talk to frequently over what's left of the internet or some old radio-type thing. You've known them for years, but have never met them in person. They're your only company in an otherwise dead world, and they're holed up somewhere else, exactly like you.

One day, they stop signing in/going on the air and you decide to find out what happened to them. You only have a faint idea where their bunker is and you know you wouldn't have enough air to get there in one stretch. That's where the game really begins. Do you make an effort to find them or what happened to them, or do you go on with your life, salvaging, exploring, and listening to your own breathing as you make your way through the still graveyard of humanity?

26 comments:

  1. Which game was this based off? I thought this was really good due to it being different to most of the other stories which are based off video games.

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  2. Very well written, and like Tempest said, I would love to know more about the game this was based on.

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    Replies
    1. It sounds like it's an idea for a game, not actually based on a game.

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  3. At first I was expecting this to turn out to be Metro 2033

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  4. I'm thinking this is partially based off of the Fallout games. LOL

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  5. Thanks (I kind of wondered about Fallout initially based off the small amounts of info I've gotten off friends and other CPs but the air supply issues didn't seem to match).

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  6. Dude, this would be such a cool game. Horrific? Maybe.
    But the atmosphere of the game... Man.

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  7. Hey, "no air means no sound" is plain wrong! It isn't the oxygen that propagates the sound, sound can go by any material.

    If by "no air" you mean complete vacuum, them everything is impossible at all, he can't survive and the planet would have severe after-effects.
    Like magma, magma everywhere.

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  8. This would be such an amazing game. This should get funded, like now. Get to it.

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  9. it be like dead space and minecraft

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  10. there could not be magma because there would be nothing to keep its heat

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  11. Sound travels through ground and solid objects faster and further that it doesn through air.

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    Replies
    1. Yes, but it is difficult to walk with your ears to the ground, because if there will be no air, sound couldn't travel from any object to your ear indirectly. Althought it is strange story because without air most things would explode because of decompression.

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    2. Not actually true. The difference in pressure between one atmosphere and vacuum isn't enough to cause a living thing to burst outright -- though it won't be good for them. It's called "explosive decompression" because of the way the air rushes out almost instantly, not because it actually makes things explode.

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  12. That sounds like an awesome game! Someone make it!

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  13. I've never played Metro 2033 before, but I'm going to buy it within a week from now. This sounds sort of like that game.

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  14. anyone, else think this would be a great add-on to the next Treyarch call of duty?

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  15. Interesting, but how the fuck would this work? Would the atmosphere simply fly off into space? What kind of doomsday prophet/nutjob considers a scenario where the air simply vanishes? Wouldn't the bunkers themselves run out of air pretty quickly? Wouldn't plants and plankton eventually restore the air's oxygen content via photosynthesis?

    This sounds a LOT more plausible in an underwater setting. As it is, this particular doomsday scenario just sounds absurd.

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  16. shut up its a good story non the less also is this a real game

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  17. LOL sounds like Dead Space to me think about it in the parts where you only have a certian amount of air... plus with the dead bodies everywhere... then you have the part where he has to decide to go looking for his friend sounds like when he went looking for his wife in Dead Space but w/e you guys think about it how you want this is just my view on it

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  18. Metro 2033. The end.

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  19. Hmmm... Nice story 7/10.

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