Paradise 33 was my first major attempt at creating a videogame. Despite it never coming to fruition, it remains one of my favorite projects that I have worked on, and the characters it birthed are still living rent free in my mind.
The name comes from a dream I had many years prior to the final story coming together. I can’t remember the dream, but I remember the words “Paradise 33” being repeated to me throughout it.
The name never left me, and years later, a story finally developed around it.
Originally, this was going to be a game about relationships. You’re trapped in a house with 6 other people, all of them with wildly different personalities. As you play, you develop friendships and romances, experience consequences for cheating or being friendly with enemies of your friends, and overall just experiment with other peoples emotions.
But a game like that would’ve been very complex for a beginner like me, so I scrapped it in favor of developing a simple point and click adventure game using Adventure Creator for Unity. It’s an amazing tool and it really helped bring my visions to life, your choices are pretty endless with it.
As I whittled down the original cast to the 3 characters that stood out the most to me, I also began to pivot the storyline from non-linear family drama to zombie apocalypse.
In a world overrun by bloated, heavy-breathing zombies, you play as Miguel, an immune individual who has been asked to join a Paradise facility, government run buildings where immune people and their families are sheltered from the zombies and studied in an effort to make a vaccine.
Joining him are his housemates, Blair Sinclair, his stoner cousin who spends most of the day in his bedroom smoking weed, and Jackie Shelton, an ex-Olympian horseback rider turned domestic terrorist and far-centrist conspiracy theorist.
Throughout the game, the intention was to slowly get Jackie out of his shell and get him to agree to come to the facility with you, as it is later revealed that Miguel is in love with him. Throughout the weeks, Jackie would ideally fall for you too, but once at the facility, he enacts a plan to blow it up along with the other Paradise facilities, effectively allowing the zombies to take over the world.
In the end, Blair goes missing, Miguel loses his glasses and becomes entirely dependent on Jackie, and Jackie sends them into hiding in the woods, believing the world to be over. This is where the proposed sequel comes into play, in which you are now running around as Jackie, fighting zombies and collecting supplies to survive, while Miguel stays in the hut you have built for him, depressed, but believing he has no other options.
And, that’s how we learn Jackie lied, and effectively kidnapped Miguel. The world didn’t end, and Jackie only wanted to escape getting in trouble for destroying the one facility he did manage to blow up.
Jackie is actually an incredibly complex character, and this was originally intended to be the very end of his story, what he has ended up as. If you’re curious about his full story, I have a comic I started that is dedicated entirely to him, though it is also unfortunately on hiatus indefinitely.
