Play The John Lennon ‘Escape To Nutopia’ Fiction Adventure Game
The immersive interactive game, the final puzzle piece in the John Lennon Mind Games campaign, takes players ‘through the looking glass onion.’
John Lennon fans won’t want to miss “Escape To Nutopia,” an interactive fiction adventure game that completes the campaign surrounding the deluxe reissue of Lennon’s Mind Games album.
“Escape To Nutopia,” which is playable at escapetonutopia.com, ushers players into an authentic experience of Lennon and Yoko Ono’s home life, based on thousands of hours of archival research and multimedia evidence. You begin by awaking as Lennon in the master bedroom at the Dakota on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, trying to figure out what to do with your day. From there it’s a journey through the realm of perceived reality, memory, time, dreams, and illusions, rooted in Lennon and Ono’s history and creative output.
Partly inspired by text-based computer games like “Colossal Cave Adventure” and “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” “Escape To Nutopia” is a collaboration between the John Lennon Estate and Loud Beings, the creative agency that previously co-created the Webby Award-winning wishtreeforyokoono.com in honor of Ono’s 90th birthday. Loud Beings also worked on the new “Citizen of Nutopia” website.
Lennon and Ono announced Nutopia, a “conceptual country,” in a press conference on April 2, 1973 at Bar of the City of New York. In recently re-released footage of the event, the couple gave their “Declaration of Nutopia,” in which they explained that anyone could be a citizen simply by acknowledging the existence of the country. “It has no land, there’s nothing to fight for, there’s no boundaries, there’s no lines to be drawn, no passports, only people,” Lennon said.
Lennon and Ono’s life together in New York City is also the subject of a new documentary. One To One: John & Yoko, which was released in theaters last Friday, centers on their free One to One benefit concert, held Aug. 30, 1972 at Madison Square Garden. The show was Lennon’s only full-length concert performance after leaving the Beatles. The film features never-before-seen and newly restored footage from 1971 and 1972, when Lennon and Ono were living in their first Greenwich Village apartment.
The 1972 One to One concert is also the subject of a new live EP, Power to the People – Live at the One to One Concert, New York City, 1972, released last weekend as a Record Store Day exclusive. The concerts raised more than $1.5 million to support children with special needs, including those at the Willowbrook State School.
