It’s not every day that I come across something that is so cool that I classify it as SEAL-SLAPPINGLY INSANE!
Geeks will remember Ultima Online, the online game that was released in 1997. What you might not know is that UO creator Richard Garriott is in my opinion a hero to haunted house culture and one of the people that I’d love to meet one day.
Garriott’s house was called Brittania Manor. Located in Austin, Texas, it was a custom built mansion with secret passages. It was based on the castle of Lord British, ruler of Britannia in UO. Just feast your eyes on this geek dream house of amazeballs:
Before, 1995 this house hosted “the most elaborate haunt in the country”. You can see some video about it here in a never-finished fan documentary. …and OH MY GOD THIS LOOKS INSANE THEY HAVE A FLYING BAT GUY.
I was still in High School at the time in Pittsburgh, so I am very sad that I did not get to experience this. This made me sad. VERY SAD.
Britannia Manor was a fully immersive haunted house where people could touch you and talk to you just like a role playing game. People would go through Garriott’s house in groups, gathering clues and performing quests. You did not simply walk through like you do in most haunts. You might even lose members of your party during the evening.
Thanks to Zombieman over on Horror Night Nightmares, I was informed that they still do a version of this haunt.
Many of the volunteers who worked on Britannia Manor now do Scare for a Cure, a charity haunted house in the Austin area directed by Jarrett Crippen, AKA The Defuser from the reality show “Stan Lee’s Who wants to be a Superhero”. There are 2 ways to experience it – the regular way, or the “red band” way where you get covered with blood.
I’ll give you one guess which way I’m going to do it when I hopefully go to Texas for this in 2013.
For more details check out Zombieman’s review of the haunt.
If anyone is going this year and would like to submit a guest post about it, I will be more than happy to post it up.
One response to “Ultima Online creator Lord British aka Richard Garriott’s legacy of interactive haunted houses in Austin, Texas”
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