Nightmare Submarine Game Gets Popular As Search For Titanic Sub Continues
Photo: Ocean Gate / Handout / Anadolu Agency (Getty Images)
As you likely are aware, five people are currently missing onboard a tourist sub that was heading down to the remains of the HMS Titanic. We don’t yet know what went wrong and if those onboard are still alive—it seems unlikely at this point—but a large-scale search for the Titan and its crew is still underway. Meanwhile, a little horror game on Steam is blowing up thanks to its eerie similarity to the real-life situation.
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The idea of being trapped—completely locked into a small submarine—and sent deep into the depths of the ocean, doomed to never return, is a nightmarish scenario that no one wants to experience. So it made sense to use that setup for a 2022 horror video game, Iron Lung. But then a few people got into a probably-not-safe submersible, bolted the door shut, and recreated that nightmare in real life. And not surprisingly, as the search for the sub continues, onlookers morbidly curious about the whole horrible situation have begun buying and playing Iron Lung, leading to a spike in its sales on Steam. Its creator behind the game isn’t quite sure what to make of it all.
On June 21, as the world became more and more aware of the missing Titan submersible, Iron Lung creator David Szymanski tweeted an image showing a large spike in sales for the small horror game.
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And over the last day or so, Szymanski has replied to folks asking questions about the game and how oddly similar it is to the Titan sub. For example, in the game, the player takes on the role of a convict who is locked into a submarine and sent on a mission to find something in a creepy blood ocean. Sure, that last bit—the creepy blood ocean—isn’t part of the Titan story. But the nightmarish part about the people inside being literally bolted inside the sub with no way out is actually true.