of the Night - Milan
From California comes a tag game of epic proportions.
It is not always easy to get to know your heroes, but when you have the chance you sometimes find that you have so many traits in common, a lot more things that unite you than you imagined.
In 2009, our heroes were 3 guys: Sean, Sam and Ian, ie Playtime Antiboredom Society, a Californian game designers and artists collective that had already developed amazing game formats while we were starting with our first project.
In 2009 we won a competition and the prize was a small budget we could use for a high-level consulting on our project. So obviously we tried to contact our heroes.
After a couple of days they responded and over the course of two weeks they helped us re-design CriticalCity, the game we were working on at the time. Going to San Francisco and having the chance to work with them was an incredible experience that changed our lives, and showed us how close we were with them in terms of ideals and aspirations. Many of the suggestions we received were based on the experience of their past projects.
Among their past projects, probably the most fun was Journey to the End of the Night, which had already been performed several times in San Francisco.
The game was in creative-commons, so anyone can organize it worldwide given that they respect certain rules: quoting the creators, not charging a ticket, and limiting to only collect donations from participants. It was an immersive night where you had to go through a series of checkpoints in a specific sequence without being caught by the fearsome chasers.
Back in Italy we put began production and finally in June of 2011 we organized the first Journey To The End of the Night Italian edition.
At the start of the first edition there were 350 people, the following year we had over 1,400!
But the thing we’re most proud of is the vitality with which the Journey has spread throughout Italy as many participants decided to organize it in their own towns and, to date, it has been replicated more than 10 times, including in Venice, Piacenza, Pavia, Matera, or even in smaller cities like Treviglio or Cremona. Every time the journey is a different experience, every time a group of passionate volunteers that adapt the format to their cities, and every time the city transforms for the duration of a fun and crazy night.
