The original handwritten manuscript for Lewis Carroll’s classic story Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has been turned into an award-winning video game concept by a team of higher education students.
The Wondering Lands of Alice has been awarded the wining game as part of the competition Off the Map , a collaboration between the British Library and Game City that challenges student teams with creating video games, text adventures and virtual environments using digitised maps, sounds, texts and illustrations from the British Library’s collections.
This winning entry was created by Off Our Rockers, a team of six students from the De Montfort University in Leicester and follows Alice on whimsical journey in an underground setting, where users are set challenges to progress to the next level.
It will be available to play in the British Library’s upcoming Alice in Wonderland exhibition, on display from the 20th November until the 17th April 2016 and celebrates the 150th anniversary since the book was originally published.
The exhibition will examine the many different ways in which Lewis Carroll’s book has captured audience’s imaginations over the years.
This particular challenge was started when curators selected a number of sound recordings, printed and manuscript items from the British Library’s collections for entrants to use for their project. These included the original handwritten manuscript of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, an excerpt from Lewis Carroll’s diary in which he records first telling his famous tale and John Tenniel’s illustrations from the 1890 edition of The Nursery Alice along with a series of maps and plans of formal gardens and subterranean worlds.
Curator of the upcoming exhibition at the British Library, Helen Melody said: “Our upcoming exhibition Alice in Wonderland considers the way in which Carroll’s famous story has fascinated successive generations of illustrators and artists, musicians, filmmakers and designers over the past 150 years. The winning Off The Map entries offer another re-imagination of Alice, this time through the medium of videogame technology, demonstrating how versatile and inspiring the story continues to be. It is really exciting that the three winning entries will be available for visitors to play in the exhibition, alongside the original manuscript.”
The winning entry was announced at the GameCity 10 festival in Nottingham on Thursday evening. Off Our Rockers group is made up of: Dan Bullock, Freddy Canton, Luke Day, Denzil Forde, Amber Jamieson and Braden May.
Alice in Wonderland is at the British Library from the 20th November until the 17th April 2016.