Parabola
I wrote Parabola for a game design contest in early 2009. It’s a game based on Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow.
An excerpt from the intro >>
Parabola
During 1944-45, 1517 German V-2 (v for vergeltungswaffe or ‘revenge weapons’) landed on London. These rockets were fired from Holland. On clear nights, Londoners could see, around the curve of the earth, starbursts of launches and streaks as moonlight or dawn reflected off vapor trails from V-2s climbing over the North Sea. At 112.3 miles above the earth the rockets reached their brenchluss – the end of burning. From this point the V-2s continue invisibly along their parabolic path, what writer Thomas Pynchon labeled ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ in his novel of the same title, before falling in a 3000 mph silent screaming onto the city below.
After a V-2 impacted, the sound arrived, “growing out of it the roar of its own fall, catching up to what’s already death and burning.” Down below civilians and members of the Allied forces sought to aid evacuees, to clean up the carnage, to manage the European theatre of battle. Among them, in Gravity’s Rainbow, walk ‘wild talents’ and researchers and clandestine agents attempting to rope the paranormal into useful forms: a soldier whose erections predicts (or perhaps summons) rockets to their craters, a Pavlovian experimenter who hunts stray dogs in off-limit sectors of the city, “cliques of spiritualists, vaudeville entertainers … lobotomy enthusiasts, Dale Carnegie zealots, all exiled by the outbreak of war from pet schemes and manias damned…”
As the war approaches its end some of these figures emerge from the recesses of their bureaucracies to undertake personal, obsessive missions into ‘The Zone’ of continental Europe. They try to unravel the secrets of the V-2 program whose rockets they have been playing a deadly game of cat and mouse with on the streets of London. One rocket in particular, with an unusual serial number and even more unlikely payload, draws their attention. Following tracks left by industrial cartels, slave labor, mystic antecedents, postwar agendas and premature redemptions, they trace the final rocket as its launch ends the book. And opens it, since the rainbow arch of the V-2 path is just the visible half of a full circle.
The game
Parabola is a game of intelligence agents, paranormal talents, rockets and rocketmen pursuing each other (and the elusive patterns of fate) across Europe in the waning months of World War 2. The game is inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow but does not seek to recreate the book’s exact plot or characters.
download it >> parabola.pdf
V-2 rocket photo by flickr user smithmatt http://www.flickr.com/photos/smithmatt/90634330/
