Explore with a team of researchers and prisoners the abyss in a submarine, all without giving in to fear of the depths. This is the scenario of the horrific video game Iron Lung, which takes the player into an immersive experience where he must navigate an ocean of blood, on an unknown planet. In recent days, this chilling story is getting closer to the news around the Titan submarine, which transported tourists near the wreck of the Titanic before disappearing.
No news of the machine since last Sunday, the search continues. And the fascination for this rescue operation has an unexpected side effect: for the past week, sales of Iron Lung, available on the Steam platform, have taken off. “I’m horrified,” said game creator and developer David Szymanski on Twitter.
The latter shared a graph on his account, which shows a peak in sales of the game recorded on June 20. Steam Spy, a website that estimates the sales of video games available on said platform, estimates the number of Iron Lung owners at between 100,000 and 200,000.
And the page dedicated to the game on Steam has seen its comments section explode in recent hours. Most refer to the disappearance of the tourist submarine. “A fun and healthy experience, which costs $250,000 to replicate in real life,” quipped one user, referring to the price of diving offered by OceanGate Expeditions.
This company is at the origin of tourist explorations, such as that carried out by the Titan submarine, in the area of the sinking of the Titanic. “Based on a true story,” adds another player laconically about the Iron Lung scenario. In total, more than 5,000 reviews were posted on the page in question.
“I understand the dark humor about this story and that of Titanic, but I designed Iron Lung to make the player’s experience as nightmarish as possible,” reacted David Szymanski, before adding: “Knowing that real people are in this situation right now terrifies me, even if it was their own decision no one deserves to die like this”. And if efforts to find the submarine continue, the Titan’s oxygen supplies could be depleted by 1:08 p.m. Thursday.
This is not the first time that dark news has triggered an unhealthy fascination among the general public and led to a renewed interest in a video game. Already during the Coronavirus epidemic, the apocalyptic simulation game Plague Inc, whose objective is to develop a deadly virus to create a pandemic, had broken a sales record almost eight years after its release.
