DreamForge’s Sanitarium is one of my favorite adventure games for its sense of Twilight Zone-ish off-ness and — I say this affectionately — intensely grimdark plot. (It’s a good companion piece to the earlier, similarly eerie game I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream.) Alexis Ong talked with the original creators and dug up some interesting details:
Dreamforge at the time was in the town of Jeanette, Pennsylvania, just outside Pittsburgh, home to a well-known glass factory whose abandoned ruins became a driving inspiration behind some of the game’s scenes. The fictional decaying town full of mutant children is named Genet, which sounds almost biblical. In Nicholson’s words, Jeannette was a “depressed small town” with the enormous ruined specter of the Jeannette Glass Factory looming over it — a mood that also affected the team’s work commute.
