THE DISTURBING REAL HISTORY BEHIND THE NEW OUTLAST TRIALS GAME
The third installment of the Outlast video game series, The Outlast Trials, was released on May 18th, 2023 for Microsoft Windows. The game puts players in the perspective of kidnapped test subjects involved in an unethical Cold War experiment run by the Murkoff Corporation. The Outlast Trials is a prequel to Outlast and Outlast II and works to unravel the real history behind the lore.Related read: Military Recruitment Marketing: Using Video Games to Recruit Troops
What is The Outlast Trials About?
The Outlast Trials is a first-person survival horror game. The new prequel immerses you in the viewpoint of a civilian captured by the Murkoff Corporation—a company that reopened the fictional Mount Massive Asylum to run immoral experiments in hopes of developing brainwashing technology. Test subjects go through experiments disguised as ‘therapy programs’ to get them to perform perverse tasks and control their minds. Players do not have any weapons and have to use items found in their environment to survive. You do not need to play the first two games to enjoy the third. If players would like to learn more about the first two games they can pick up documents on the ground labeled ‘evidence’ for more information. https://youtu.be/DuKkethkMeo Suggested Read: How Military Video Games Peek Into the Future of the Armed Forces
The Real History Behind the Outlast Trials Lore
The Outlast Trials takes place in the 1950s during the Cold War. During this time in history, tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union were rising. The video game does mention this throughout but the real parallel between historical events and the lore is the Murkoff Corporation itself. The Murkoff Corporation is a fictional American company specializing in mind control experiments. The company experiments with the inmates from the made-up Mount Massive Asylum. Where the game starts to recount some truth is when it references MK-Ultra files. During the early Cold War period, there were rumors that the communists had developed a technique for mind control. This resulted in the CIA coming up with a secret program of their own, MK-Ultra, to try to formulate a mind control drug that could be used on enemies.Sidney Gottlieb, a chemist in the CIA, created and ran the program. His experiments took place in prisons and detention centers, not unlike the environment in the video game. Many of these real-life subjects were psychologically tortured using electric shock, isolation, and high levels of LSD. Eventually, Gottlieb concluded that there was no possible way to execute mind control after he had killed and mentally damaged many participants.Project MK-Ultra was carried out at over 80 institutions including universities, prisons, and hospitals. In 1973, Director of the CIA Richard Helms ordered all MK-Ultra files to be destroyed. This detail is referenced in Outlast and Outlast II. In 1977, there was a hearing that brought the CIA's Select Committee of Intelligence and the Subcommittee for Health and Human Research in front of the US Senate. The report noted that the CIA experiments run for Project MK-Ultra made little scientific sense, were disturbing, and were practiced on unwitting subjects.
The Outcome of Project MK-Ultra
In response to the terrors that occurred during the project, the U.S. Senate put a new legislature in place to monitor and organize these committees so that something like this would not occur again. The Senate also made an effort to inform all 85 institutions that hosted the experiments about the true nature of the “research” they were conducting. They also found it necessary to attempt to help any participant negatively affected by the experiments. The file from the joint hearing can provide more information about the plan for improvement following the hearing in 1977: Joint Hearing: PROJECT MKULTRA, THE CIA'S PROGRAM OF RESEARCH IN BEHAVIORAL MODIFICATIONAlthough the release of this new installment of the Outlast Series is very exciting to the fandom, it is important to note the perspective shown in the video game was the reality for many uninformed civilians only sixty years ago. Read Next: High Schoolers Invented the First FPS Game During a Work Study at DARPA