Shaping Reality Into a Historical Game: Inside Ariodante’s Hidden Masterpiece

Forget everything you think you know about games and about what the ultimate luxury is, and instead, think about what could happen when fiction and reality merge into an adventure so unique and immersive it creates an entirely new genre. What if a live-action game doesn’t follow a pre-set narrative but unfolds through the player’s continuous real-world decisions?

We sat with Ricardo Araujo, Ariodante Travel’s Founder and CEO, to discuss his latest creation, THE QUEEN’S LOST DIAMONDS, the world’s first multi-dimensional, player-led immersive game in Paris. An historic live-action conspiracy rooted in French history, using the entire city as its playground and shaped by complete secrecy, danger, and competing truths; for a handful of selected thrill-seekers.

You are creating something that you say has never been attempted before, yet it is so secretive no one can know about it, not even those participating. Why do this at all?

RA: When I started imagining, years ago, what would eventually become THE QUEEN’S LOST DIAMONDS, I envisioned a psychological trap the player would have to escape from. A sort of labyrinth of the mind, full of mirrors, glass walls, and illusions, that would actually be the player’s main opponent. So, in a way, an anti-game, as games, especially live-action ones, are structured to help the player and drive the outcome. Back then it was just another of my crazy ideas, one I thought was a dream because unfeasible in real life, even more so with the constraints of a narrative unfolding in real time.

Then, after creating in 2019 The Mystery of the Blue Train, an immersive murder mystery set in the 1920s where my actors were embedded into the game and the narrative instead of performing as in immersive theatre or helping players as in any traditional murder mystery or escape room, I knew my “crazy dream” was not unfeasible. It was just too complex to be done unless I changed the entire concept of what immersive games are and how they work.

That’s when I started meeting with countless game designers during my trips as I was planning Ariodante’s creations. I met also with playwrights and other incredible professionals who could help me approach things differently. My goal was to understand the limitations, constraints, and challenges they faced when turning ideas into games, novels, films, and more. For months, that nurtured my own reflexion on how I could turn the tables and break the limitations the best game designers faced.

This is how I realised one of the secret ingredients was absolute secrecy, especially towards the person playing the game. If I give that person even basic information—when the game takes place, what the story is, a mission, their opponents, or anything—I’m undermining the entire concept and destroying my chances of achieving a fiction so real it becomes a parallel reality that blurs the lines between fiction and reality. If I keep everything secret, especially from the player, it all becomes possible because that player will now have to play exactly as we live, without knowing anything about the future. If my fiction obeys the same rules reality does, then I can have my parallel reality and this “madness” can actually exist and be real.

You’ve said this is more than a game and that you will be blurring the line that separates fiction from reality, but isn’t that just a sort of marketing claim rather than what will really happen? After all, someone playing the game knows it is all just a game, so knows it is all fiction, right?

RA: You are absolutely right. When you sign for a game, you know you are playing it as soon as it starts and until you finish. But let me ask you this: what if you don’t know when the game really starts? What if this conversation, right now, is already part of the game and you don’t know you are playing it? Or even more importantly, what if, as you play, you are “left alone” to solve everything, and that means it is your own actions and deductions that drive the story?

Blurring the lines between fiction and reality doesn’t mean you forget reality or deny it. It means you cannot tell the difference, therefore you doubt. If you read something somewhere you know is real but that something is in fact planted—but in a way that doesn’t distort reality but simply “nudges” you in a certain direction that leads you towards our fiction—you cannot know you started walking on a fictional path, especially if you are the one deciding on the path you take, in a 100% real setting like a city.

You could envision this fully immersive game as constantly walking on a very fine line where everything needs to be carefully calibrated and personalised to each individual. And because the handful of people chosen to play this one-off extraordinary game are far from being easy to fool, we know we will need to build layers and layers of “seemingly transparent” lies for them to feel they’ve never left the reality they know. This is a tremendous challenge and probably the reason why no one has ever attempted something even half as complex.

You’ve called this a once-in-history event, one that exists purely because you imagined it. What changes when you’re creating something entirely for yourself, with no brief and no limits? And what does that unlock that client work never could?

RA: For me it’s mostly a challenge and the opportunity to remove any constraints on what I can do and go as far as I can imagine.

Every project I take on for one of the handful of members we work for is about them and their loved ones. We spend months creating from scratch ideas and stories, pushing boundaries of what’s possible, since we operate only in what’s not available. Each project is unique and, as some say, a work of ephemeral art, but my focus is on those travelling. This time, though, I can choose a very small number of thrill-seekers to “drag them” into my world.

" Players will be searching in original manuscripts and historical documents to solve a mystery historians haven’t yet fully solved. "

The Queen’s Lost Diamonds is a one-off project I’ve created for me. A project whose only limitations are those of my imagination and creativity, and the limitations of the stellar team I’ve put together. Of course, it’s pointless saying I choose only people capable of bringing to life every crazy idea I have, while adding their own expertise and imagination to go even further.

I’ve put together a team including world-renowned historians and scholars, screenwriters, stunt experts, skilled people from the cinema industry, and even fashion and logistics experts. Over 30 people I’ve challenged for months to solve abstract and sometimes seemingly unsolvable problems, and they’ve all risen to the occasion beyond my craziest expectations.

So what is this game for me? It’s defying the limits of what’s possible even further than what I’ve done since I founded Ariodante almost 10 years ago and the thrill of bringing to life the idea of walking a line between mirrors and truths that is so thin one could fall, drawn by the curiosity of what lies underneath…

Can you tell us what the game is about?

RA: I’m afraid I can’t, because even that would give structural clues and I would be “guiding” players by letting them prepare or leading them to expect x or y.

All I can say is players will be dragged into an adventure where nothing is what it seems. They will have to uncover a conspiracy without falling into another, or lose themselves in the process. They will go through ancient secrets and confront history itself while facing many dangers and challenges. This game requires intuition to navigate through a labyrinth made of layers of truths and lies, where identity dissolves into power, and seduction and deceit become both a weapon and a currency.

In a nutshell, the game is about us, and about how far we are willing to go to achieve our goal, both figuratively and literally.

How does this game differ from any other immersive game or live-action experience? Could you tell us more about how you created it?

RA: The Queen’s Lost Diamonds doesn’t obey the same “rules” traditional games have when it comes to game design and structure. Here, everything is open to let the player drive the story and, in a way, even the plot. This “freedom of action and thought” is what actually structures everything, or one could say, it’s what “de-structures” it all.

When using a set “structure” like a plot, a mission, or whatever, we get a game and/or a narrative that leads the player. A clue leads to another clue, finding a key leads to opening a door, and so on, and everything serves the purpose of the mission players have. Every planned action has a purpose and leads to something else. The only “unscripted” part is therefore the “how” the player plays and how the group interacts among themselves and with the game to achieve the mission. But what if we could remove that structure? What if we could find a way for the game to stop “helping the player”, or even better, to come up with a way in which the game literally plays against the players by trapping them in its own fabric or logic?

Of course, I cannot say a word about how we’re achieving this, because it would mean giving away clues on how to defeat the game. What I can say is that this is a multi-dimensional game where there’s no right or wrong, no true or false, no good or bad. There are only your own choices and actions. Here, players don’t “play”. They live the game. It is their actions, thoughts, deductions and, most of all, choices that are the sole drivers of the plot. This is why this is actually the first real “player-led game” ever created, at least in this absolute form. And to add an even more incredible and never-seen-before layer of uniqueness, this game will be completely embedded in French history. Players will actually be investigating a real historical conspiracy, with all the events that led to it and all its consequences. They will be searching in original manuscripts and historical documents to solve a mystery historians haven’t yet fully solved.

So this game actually reacts to the player's choices? How does this works and does that mean that every decision is irreversible?

RA: To understand the logic, the mechanics of this game, and the “irreversibility”, think about your daily life and how your choices shape your life. You might choose to have lunch on a given day because it is your lunch break, or because you are meeting someone, or because you are hungry, or whatever. But ultimately, you are the one initiating the action, and that action triggers other events or can bring unexpected consequences. What if, for example, while in the restaurant you chose, a clumsy waiter stumbles and spills red wine on you? Will you be able to clean yourself before your next meeting? Will you go with your white shirt full of red wine? Will you run to a shop to quickly buy a new one? As in daily life, each choice has inevitable consequences you cannot see in advance. Inside The Queen’s Lost Diamonds, it is exactly the same.

The entire game is a labyrinth of hidden possibilities that keeps changing and adapting to you as you make choice after choice. If you leave that restaurant and choose to go left, something will happen. Same if you go right. And if you stay put, something else happens. But as you choose, you also close the other options you had. That simple example illustrates the construct of this unique game. It shows the incredible complexity at play and explains why something like this has never been attempted, other than in novels or cinema. So, if we add to that the historical dimension, where players investigate real facts using historical documents, and the fact you won’t be playing alone, as others are also searching for what you are searching, and these others not only could be anyone, but could choose to ruin your plans, we get something that could be defined as the most complex and thrilling live-action game ever attempted, where you don’t play a character. You are the subject.

You’ve said no one has ever attempted something like this. What makes this game genuinely a "world-first"?

RA: The Queen’s Lost Diamonds is indeed an incredibly complex game, and this makes it a world first on several conceptual and logistical metrics. It is, for example, the first game ever created that lasts 3 whole days and uses an entire city like Paris as its playground, but it’s also the first game to be played in some of the most iconic monuments, landmarks, and historical places. Here, you don’t play in a venue set for the occasion. You play where history really happened, including many places very few people even know exist. You might have to gain access to the reserves of a famous museum, break into another at night, and go where no one is allowed to go. You will face real dangers and moments that will test your bravery, your deduction skills, and outsmart your opponents or turn an enemy into an ally or vice versa.

" Players will actually uncover historical secrets that have so far remained hidden. "

There are also several other records this game will set because of the scale and uniqueness of its conception. Not only is it the longest continuous game ever, once we discard role-playing events and other similar non-continuous games, it is also the highest ratio of actors to players, and the game with the most scenes ever created (more than 100 structural scenes, plus many more non-structural). This becomes even more groundbreaking when we consider The Queen’s Lost Diamonds is a one-off game, never to be repeated, that each of the few selected participants will experience differently, as each player leads their own adventure.

But beyond these world records and complexity, The Queen’s Lost Diamonds is, above everything else, a game that will shed new light into an important page of French History. Players will actually uncover historical secrets that have so far remained hidden. The game will have a great positive impact by contributing to history, supporting cultural institutions, and solving a centuries old mystery.

"Sometimes I feel the more I try solving a problem, the more problems I create that mess with what I thought was already sorted out."

Who was the first person you let in—and what did they do with it?

RA: It was Florian, the director of my French Riviera office, but he doesn’t know it, because I never told him that, years ago, I was really working on finding a way to turn this impossible madness into reality. As he knows me well, he loved the idea, and his enthusiasm showed me I had to find a way, no matter how long it would take.

Then, the first person I told about this specific game—not the concept—was my games production right hand, Maeva. She had already led the production of a very small immersive game we had to deliver in under three weeks instead of months. Back then, she didn’t know we were already making history with that multi-location immersive game, so when I told her about the Queen’s Lost Diamonds project, she just laughed and signed in without much thinking, because she couldn’t miss out on an adventure of this magnitude. After all, how many times in a lifetime do we have the opportunity to literally make history?

If I remember well, the person in the team who “hesitated” the most took something like ten minutes. What I don’t know is how many nightmares they’ve all had since we started, because of the insane challenges I keep throwing at them haha.

How about you? Are you giving yourself nightmares?

RA: Haha no, thank God. But I do get some insomnia sometimes, or wake up wondering how on earth I ended up embarking on such a “madness”. But that thought never lasts, because this is also a thrilling and fun adventure for me.

I love challenges, and this one is like assembling several gigantic puzzles with all the pieces mixed together, no control images, no borders, and literally no idea what you are assembling. Sometimes I feel the more I try solving a problem, the more problems I create that mess with what I thought was already sorted out.

You said players will be selected, so how does this work and who would be the ideal player for something like this?

RA: Because this game isn’t like anything else, as it is meticulously embedded in reality and history that carries real stakes. Because each player continuously shapes their own experience throughout the game while simultaneously influencing another player’s reality, often without even knowing, it isn’t for everyone. Money therefore won’t buy you access. Only your drive and boldness will. This is why I will be personally selecting the participants, and only the chosen ones will receive the details two months in advance - including the date.

There’s only a handful of tickets, but no one will know how many exactly. Each ticket allows its holder to bring up to three players to assemble a team. This means a team could be a single person, two, or up to four. I will personally vet each player in each team to ensure they are the right fit, but also to personalise everything to each person. That’s the reason there’s not even a set price, but only a starting price per team. And of course, every pre-selected player will be required to sign an NDA to prevent any potential leaks that would harm the game or bring unwanted attention while it’s unfolding.

As for who is the ideal player, there’s no way to answer the question with precision, precisely because the game is first and foremost a challenge to oneself, where there is no stage, no spectators, and no reruns. Somehow, everyone could be the right player, as far as the person has the drive and is brave enough to walk into the unknown with nothing more than their intelligence and instincts. The only limit we impose is age. No one under 16 can participate, because the game is not suitable for children and there is simply no way it could ever be tailored to accommodate them.

***

It is always easier to talk afterward than to be the one who actually did it. So the question is: will you dare to challenge Ariodante’s first opus of this kind, or will you be one of the many who missed it?

You can now apply to be among the happy few who will take part in this historical event — one that pushes the boundaries of luxury and what’s possible to new heights.

THE QUEEN'S LOST DIAMONDS

You can also peek behind the curtain of its making by following @TheRealTravelAlchemist, Ricardo’s Instagram account. For the first time since founding Ariodante, he will be sharing glimpses of the game as he and his team build it. Perhaps you’ll catch a clue even they didn’t see.