The Walrider has other uses. Please see The Walrider (Disambiguation) for other meanings.
Project Walrider was an experiment conducted by the Murkoff Corporation at Mount Massive Asylum in September 2013 and serves as the catalyst for the incident following the project's failure and the first game, as well as its side story.
The project involved the use of the asylum's psychologically damaged patients, known as Variants, to be put through a process known as the Morphogenic Engine, where they would be tortured in order to allow them to control a swarm of nanites through lucid dreaming in order to create a sentient being known as The Walrider, the goal of the project.
The experiment was headed by german scientist and creator of both the Morphogenic Engine and the Walrider itself, Rudolf Gustav Wernicke, while being overseen by Murkoff executive, Jeremy Blaire.
History[]
After learning about Wernicke's research on nanorobotics and the Morphogenic Engine process, the Murkoff Corporation had him brought on and re-opened Mount Massive Asylum in 2009 under the guise of a "charitable organization", when in reality, it was so they could use the asylum's patients as human test subjects in secret to avoid the attention of the authorities.
They established an underground labratory deep beneath the asylum where they constructed the Morphogenic Engine itself and where they could force the inmates into undergoing the process of watching Wernicke's recordings of spontaneous bleeding, causing their minds to devolve further into the brink of utter madness. This was done in order to force them into a lucid dream state where they could control the nanites to create a nanoswarm that they could control, allowing them to become the Walrider's host.
Over the course of the next four years, Murkoff would continually use patients and even members of their own staff if they found them as expendable or attempting to expose their illegal experimentation, such as Dr. Richard Trager or software engineer Waylon Park, as test subjects dubbed as Variants in order to find the right mind that could successfully host the nanoswarm. These attempts would always end in failures and not only severely damage the minds of the already ill patients but even physically change them and cause them to be inhuman in both physical ability and appearance.
Eventually, one such Variant, known as William "Billy" Hope, achieved in making a lateral ascension during the process and successfully became the first host of the Walrider. Despite this however, the Walrider was somehow able to escape and being controlled by the demented mind of Billy, began to slaughter anyone it could find, regardless of whether they were with Murkoff or not. This incident also allowed the Variants to break free and begin murdering the Murkoff doctors, guards and other employees in revenge for the experimentation done on them.
Trivia[]
- The project is referred to by its logo as "Walrider Project" instead of "Project Walrider".