Mystery of the Colonel's Ghost

At the 2009 Adelaide Fringe festival, the Urban Game The Mystery of the Colonel’s Ghost transformed the Adelaide streets into a treasure hunt playground. Players were taken on a journey that transports them back into time when Colonel Light first designed the city of Adelaide.

Using GPS-equipped mobile phones and a treasure map participants played the game in which they interacted with other players, locals and features in the environment, based on their GPS location and slowly but surely could see the Colonel’s mystery unfold.

The Mystery of the Colonel’s Ghost was played in 2009, created on 7scenes software. 7scenes is a mobile and online platform to create, play and share GPS games and tours. With 7scenes it’s easy to set up location-based experiences that can have a range of different rules of interaction: from complex multi-user role playing games to interactive treasure hunts to media-rich cultural tours.

In 1835 Colonel William Light selected the location for the city of Adelaide and started his now famous design of the street plan. From Montefiore Hill where he first stood and surveyed the flat plain that was soon to become Adelaide he formed his 'Vision'. But what was this vision? The game continues on this theme: Light left a message in his city design for all future residents of Adelaide to discover. A message not easy to decipher, not known to many and only visible to those that really pay attention to "Light's Vision".

Adelaide Fringe began in 1960 as an alternative to the Adelaide Festival, which offered limited opportunity for local and smaller-scale artists. As an open access event, the Fringe allowed anyone with ideas and enthusiasm to register and be a part of the program, showcasing their arts to a welcoming public.

Adelaide Fringe and Adelaide Festival ran side by side, every second year, for over three decades until 2007, the year that the Adelaide Fringe became an annual event.