GamesInside Bridge Command, a life-sized starship ready to propel you into spaceWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
GamesInside Bridge Command, a life-sized starship ready to propel you into spaceWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: Bridge Command)
Owen Kingston is Parabolic Theatre’s artistic director; today, according to the insignia on his jumpsuit, he’s also the captain of the USC Havock. Kingston lays one palm on a scanner and its entrance opens, with that trademark science-fiction swoosh, to reveal the metallic angles of a starship’s access corridor.
Off it, beyond another door – swoosh – is a shuttle pod, used for away-mission excursions or emergency evacuations. At the far end is a med bay and a cargo dock, complete with a brig, its entrance outlined with red light. On our way to the bridge, our tour guide points out bunks set into the corridor’s walls. These are so that sessions can eventually run overnight, or for entire weekends, he explains. Off this corridor is something rarely seen in sci-fi shows: a bathroom, its video porthole displaying the starfield outside. “We thought about putting showers into the ships too, but at some point you have to start axing things,” Kingston laughs. “It’s incredible how quickly you can spend three million quid.”
Up and away
(Image credit: Bridge Command)
The Havock is one of two ships currently being built within the railway arches of London’s Vauxhall station, where Parabolic Theatre will be opening Bridge Command to the public in late March. “Nobody’s really done this before,” Kingston says – and that includes Parabolic itself. It has been producing immersive shows since 2016, but this ship sits somewhere between a theatre set, escape room and video game peripheral.
There are disadvantages to using EmptyEpsilon, Kingston acknowledges: “The 3D graphics engine is a decade old”. And even then, given the game’s humble origins, it wasn’t exactly competing with Elite: Dangerous. The objects and environments on screen look like they could be from a decade earlier still, while the UI of various supporting maps, menus and radar screens is sharply functional, looking more like graphing software than a game. But perhaps that’s thematically appropriate. Besides, Kingston insists, “What we’ve found is that people don’t tend to notice too much when they’re actually playing.”
Subscribe(Image credit: Future PLC)This feature originally appeared in Edge Magazine. For more fantastic in-depth interviews, features, reviews, and more delivered straight to your door or device,subscribe to Edge.
Subscribe
(Image credit: Future PLC)This feature originally appeared in Edge Magazine. For more fantastic in-depth interviews, features, reviews, and more delivered straight to your door or device,subscribe to Edge.
(Image credit: Future PLC)
This feature originally appeared in Edge Magazine. For more fantastic in-depth interviews, features, reviews, and more delivered straight to your door or device,subscribe to Edge.
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Love exploring (virtual) space and pushing the bounds of reality? Check out the 25Best sci-fi gamesto travel into the future with
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Love exploring (virtual) space and pushing the bounds of reality? Check out the 25Best sci-fi gamesto travel into the future with
Love exploring (virtual) space and pushing the bounds of reality? Check out the 25Best sci-fi gamesto travel into the future with
Love exploring (virtual) space and pushing the bounds of reality? Check out the 25Best sci-fi gamesto travel into the future with
Love exploring (virtual) space and pushing the bounds of reality? Check out the 25Best sci-fi gamesto travel into the future with
“We’re trying to pioneer what we’re calling ‘adaptive narrative’, where the audience isn’t limited to a set of pre-chosen options, like a decision tree”
“We’re trying to pioneer what we’re calling ‘adaptive narrative’, where the audience isn’t limited to a set of pre-chosen options, like a decision tree”
Beyond this core loop of simple activities, Kingston promises there’s room for players to improvise new solutions on the fly. “The scenarios are all designed to give loads of different ways of tackling the problem,” he says, demonstrating one prop that players will explicitly be told not to use. But unlike the light sockets of an escape room, these rules are there to be broken. Players who think to use this equipment will gain a temporary boost, but at a cost, since it triggers an invisible countdown to a story event.
“We’re trying to pioneer what we’re calling ‘adaptive narrative’,” Kingston says, “where the audience isn’t limited to a set of pre-chosen options, like a decision tree.” This is a perfectly common concept in video game design, of course: presenting players with a consistent world and toolset that can be applied in multiple ways is the philosophy underpinning everything from Dishonored to Tears Of The Kingdom. But it’s not how things have traditionally worked in live interactive environments. In escape rooms, there’s generally a single solution to be found, while immersive theatre shows might just offer a choice of scenes to investigate.
Applying videogame principles in this way hasn’t been easy, it seems. Bridge Command has been in the works since 2019, when Parabolic first tested a version “knocked together out of bits of plywood, in a basement”. But, Kingston argues, the approach does have its advantages: “A game developer can’t be sat next to you, coding things on the fly to accommodate your choices, but we can.” Players, it seems, won’t be the only ones improvising. “We’ve got live actors, who can think and adapt, and bend the story around the decisions the audience make.”
Space invader
(Image credit: Bridge Command)
As for what those story reasons might be, Kingston alludes to a few scenarios Parabolic has up its sleeve. Players might be tasked with escorting a nosy politician, adding an extra layer of social interaction with an actor, or else made responsible for a prisoner who breaks free. It’s easy to think of these as Star Trek episodes, and Parabolic wants to take that further, linking stories together into longer arcs, using a custom version of Notion’s workflow tool to track returning players. “The gamemaster can make sure they’re not giving them the same mission again, but also remember characters they’ve interacted with, and use that to brief the actors before they go on,” Kingston says. “If we can make you feel like you’re the stars of your own sci-fi TV show, and the world remembers you, the hope is that people will want to re-attend.”
The ships can even dock with one another, using a polytunnel that the Parabolic team can move into place. Kingston has plans to use this method to introduce away missions, too, where players can visit sets built elsewhere within the arches: “A space station or a research lab or whatever – we really want to build a space casino at some point.” It’d be much easier to just let players walk freely between these, of course, but the idea is that a door never needs to swoosh open into what should be the void of space. Having worked so hard to construct this fantasy, Parabolic wants to maintain an airlock between it and the real world.
This feature originally appeared inEdge magazine. For more fantastic features, you cansubscribe to Edge right hereorpick up a single issue today.
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