Hart Island (in progress)

maya, torque game engine

The Hart Island virtual environment/game alows the player to experience Hart Island’s many layers of history. Originating in the “Reformatory for Vicious Boys,” the player takes on the persona of an escaped inmate who can move through time using a series of portholes.

While escape from the island is an option, the specific goal of the game is up to the user. As escaping brings the game to an end, the user may decide that continued exploration, without being caught or killed, is the ultimate goal.

Hart Island is located in Long Island Sound and is the former site of a Union Soldier training camp, Confederate and German U-boat sailor POW camps, and once housed a cold-war era NIKE missile installation.

Hart Island still functions as a Potter’s Field where between 750,000 and 800,000 indigent and unidentified bodies have been buried between 1869 and the present. It has also been home to a variety of charity hospitals, tuberculosis and yellow fever quarantines, prisons, psychiatric and rehabilitation centers.

*Source: www.correctionhistory.org