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![]() Exploring Anastasia
Mystery of Anastasia: now on the Net
On July 16, 1918, Nicholas Romanov, former Tsar of the Russian Empire, his wife Alexandra and their five children, are summoned from their beds and ordered to the basement of the Siberian house where they are being held as prisoners. Their Communist captors tell them they will be photographed. Posed for a portrait, they face the cellar door.
So begins the Internet game Clicking Anastasia - the latest exploration of the secrets behind the death of the last Russian Tsar. The goal is to discover what happened to the Romanov fortune. Was it lost? Or hidden? And if hidden, where? To find the answers, users must sift through historical documents and family photographs as well as stay on alert for KGB agents and gold diggers who will betray them.
Still, Clicking Anastasia is special. Its beauty is not its intricate design as a mystery but the way it stays true to the facts. "I like creating digital experience that recreate history," said Andrew Nelson, Clicking Anastasia's creator. "In this case it was easy. The facts about the Romanovs are much more interesting than any fiction we could come up with." Not everyone feels that way. The 1956 film, Anastasia starring Ingrid Bergman, lent credence to the case of Anna Anderson, the most famous claimant to the Russian throne. (DNA tests later scientifically proved that Ms Anderson, who spoke no Russian, was not a Romanov.)
"In Hollywood, where you are spending millions of dollars, people get scared," said Mr Nelson. "They go to the tried and true formula that they are sure will sell." Clicking Anastasia certainly has no formula. Who you trust influences how your adventure ends. But perhaps that is appropriate. For today, debate about what actually happened in 1918 continues to rage. Robert K Massie, author of The Romanovs: The Final Chapter, which charts the search for, and identification of, the family bones, said people were kept fascinated by "the horror of their deaths, the savagery, the bestiality of taking these people down into the cellar and massacring them". "Nothing in this story is final, even today." |
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