The decision to close Nutty Putty Cave after John Jones died inside it almost 16 years ago still stirs up controversy. For most of the nearly 60 years prior to Jones’ death, the cave had been a popular Utah County attraction. Students, Boy Scout troops and families had explored its larger rooms together while the more adventurous souls shimmied through its narrower tunnels.
Yet in December 2009, unable to remove Jones’ body and concerned about the safety and behavior of future explorers, officials collapsed and sealed the cave mouth. Despite numerous protests, Nutty Putty would never be explored again.
Until now — with the aid of a virtual reality headset.
With the help of Brandon Kowalis, one of the cavers who attempted to rescue Jones, a Polish gamemaker has mapped out the entirety of Nutty Putty Cave. On Friday, 3R Games released an update to its new Cave Crave game that enables players to walk, crouch, crawl and climb through Nutty Putty’s 1,400 feet of chutes and tunnels.
“It is a very unique experience that you might not like immediately. Some people are put off by it,” said Piotr Surmacz, the CEO of 3R Games and the lead developer of the project. “But it’s definitely a one-of-a-kind experience, because instead of providing you with a vast space to explore, it squeezes you into a very tight space.”
Jones died when he became stuck upside down in a passage not much wider than his head. Yet Surmacz emphasized that his intentions in recreating the Nutty Putty experience were not macabre. Voice-guided notes dole out facts about the cave at various points throughout the journey, and the circumstances around Jones’ death are among them. Yet, the cave contains no body and no jump scares. In fact, the developers blocked off the area beyond where Jones got stuck as a way of dissuading players from trying to recreate his predicament.
Surmacz’s inspiration for the game is rooted in Jones’ story, however. Shortly after watching the James Cameron thriller “Sanctum” a few years back, the game developer stumbled across a video about Jones and the 27-hour endeavor to extract him.
“It really damaged me emotionally,” Surmacz, 41, said. “I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and I fell down the rabbit hole of reading everything I could find about it: about how he got there, about the efforts of rescuers and why it was so hard. And I couldn’t stop imagining what I would do if I were him or if I were his rescuers.”
That led him to envision an unusual virtual reality concept. Most virtual reality experiences, he said, are fast-paced and either purely educational or purely entertainment. Their worlds also tend to be expansive places, like outer space or under water. He wanted a slow-paced, educational game in the least expansive place possible.
“When I pitched the idea to my team the first time that the game will be super slow, it will be crawling in a very dark, wet tunnel and the whole idea of using VR will be to put the environmental pressure on yourself,” Surmacz said, “my team were like: ‘And who would be interested in trying it?’”
Thousands of people, it turns out.
Since the launch of Cave Crave on Meta Quest in June and PlayStation VR2 in July, it has sold more than 40,000 copies, according to a news release. That version features only fictional caves and is gamified. Players can go on quests, lose their lives or their flashlights and, yes, even encounter monsters in the dark tunnels.
Nutty Putty is Cave Crave’s only real-life structure. It has none of those fantasy components and 3R Games plans to keep it free, Surmacz said, so as to not give the appearance that it is trying to profit from the fascination with Jones’ death. The digital restoration, according to the news release, allows for a “respectful, authentic way to explore a site.”
Nutty Putty is considerably more realistic than the fabricated caves, however, and much of that detail comes from Kowallis.
The Taylorsville caver who was called out to help in the 20th hour of Jones’ rescue effort, had explored Nutty Putty numerous times. He had also helped map it, and last year he posted the map on his blog after growing weary of answering questions about the cave’s layout. That map and other tidbits Kowallis knew about the cave, including areas where passages ascended or descended steeply and the texture of the walls and floor, became the basis for recreation of Nutty Putty in a virtual setting. Developers at 3R Games also consulted videos and photos shot inside the cave to get what Surmacz said is an 85% to 90% accurate reproduction.
In addition to providing the map, Kowallis said he has been asked by 3R Games to be the informational voice in parts of the cave. Kowallis said he’s enjoyed helping and hopes the virtual reality tour sheds more light on the trials both Jones and rescuers faced inside Nutty Putty.
“Hopefully they’ll get a sense that it’s difficult to navigate just when you’re having a good time,” Kowallis said. “And when you’re not having a good time and you’ve got to rescue [someone], that just just compounds everything.”
3R Games has looked into recreating other existing caves, Surmacz said. But the ones most requested are the world’s largest, and the effort of mapping them may not be worth the cost. So far, the company has found no others quite as intriguing as Nutty Putty.
“What better place would [there] be to virtualize,” he said, “than a place that you aren’t able to visit in reality?”