Time Travel Log #3

In 2019 we started the process of planning and designing the new games for the location we hoped to one day move to. Among the locations we considered exploring was Pompeii, so I began to read articles and watch numerous videos on the topic. I was fortunate enough to have actually traveled to Pompeii when I was in undergrad, and it was a surreal experience exploring those ruins. The sheer size is overwhelming, it is an entire city worth of ruins in the process of being currently excavated.

In one of the videos I watched, I learned that charred scrolls had been discovered in Herculaneum, a neighboring city that was also destroyed when Mt. Vesuvius erupted. These scrolls are essentially charcoal briquettes. Archaeologists believed that with modern technology these scrolls could be read because the ink and the parchment, even though both are now charcoal, are still different.

It was at this point the ghost of a game began to form in my mind. What if one of these scrolls were in the process of translation and the opening lines gave the impression treasure was at stake? Then I thought, what if Time Travel was real and we could go back to when the scroll was not charcoal and could read it? It was at this point the Bureau of Sequential Time & Anomalies was born.

Time Travel forward to this year, approximately 6 days after we opened our new location. I was looking up some current news events when I read an article entitled Deciphered Herculaneum Papyrus Reveals Precise Burial Place of Plate written by Jennifer Ouellette. You really can’t write a better call to action for archaeologists to go exploring than that. For those that have played our newest game, you will see an even crazier coincidence.