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What's your inspiration?



“All right, Jones.  How are you going to find that statue in all this junk?”
And so it begins: Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis.  One of the best games ever created (save for Monkey Island).
I played it time and time again as a child, completing it every way possible.  Never tiring of the gameplay or the dialogue.  Discovering every Easter egg hidden.  If you showed a millennial the game today they would probably laugh at its clunky, pixelated graphics, but for me they only add to the appeal.
If I didn’t have a wife and kids…or a job…or housework, I would probably be playing it right now.  Laughing at the same jokes.  Getting stuck in the same places.
For those not fortunate enough to have played the game, Indiana Jones is on a quest to find Atlantis before Nazis (“I hate those guys”) discover its secrets and take over the world.  You help him through a number of tricky situations, picking up clues as you go, occasionally fighting the bad guys by hitting the arrow keys fast and hard, and eventually you find it.  A magical world hidden underwater.  Remnants of a lost civilisation.   
I was 5 when the game came out and I was instantly hooked on the myth.  Monkey Island (another game from Lucasarts which I quickly became entranced by) was also based on discovering a lost island.  But it was the lost island of Atlantis that my mind kept returning to.  Something about it was almost tangible.
A number of years later I discovered a book whilst perusing a second hand book store that had a profound effect on me – From Atlantis to the Sphinx by Colin Wilson.  It laid out various arguments for an advanced civilisation that existed many thousands of years before common wisdom suggests is possible.  I followed it up by reading various books which had been referenced by Wilson and fell further down the rabbit hole.  What if, what if, what if!  More reading.  More questions.
Could there be any link between this ancient civilisation whose footprints are visible around the world today and the fabled sunken “Atlantis”?  Maybe!  Even if there isn’t, it could make a good story.   
There are many books on Atlantis.  So many you could fill a library with them.  Many tend to be located in the non-fiction aisle, arguing over where it is located (pretty much everywhere on earth has been cited) and claiming to hold all the answers.  Others are fictional books with the protagonist discovering Atlantis somewhere deep in the ocean (like David Gibbins’ “Atlantis”).  Others are pure fantasy, crossing over galaxies and into other worlds and dimensions.  Very few, however, seem to do justice to Plato’s Atlantis (unless you plough into Ignatius Donnelly’s “Atlantis: The Antediluvian World”) and – bearing in mind he is the founding father of the myth – I think it’s about time someone tried.
So my inspiration is trying to find (fictional) answers for the wide-eyed 5 year old me who’s still mesmerized by that magical lost world discovered playing a computer game and who still hasn't found a story that does justice to the legend.   
 
       

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