The Origin of PARANOID: From Radio Drama to Interactive Fiction

A story that refused to leave

PARANOID began in 2013 as a single, stubborn image: a man alone in a suburban house at night, convinced that something in his own memory was lying to him. I wrote the first draft as a movie script — a low-budget psychological thriller built around one location, a handful of characters, and a slow, quiet dread that never quite lets go.

The script kept getting reshuffled. Financing an indie feature is hard, especially for a story that lives inside a character's head. But the idea would not sit still. It kept whispering.

A detour into radio drama

A few years later I rewrote PARANOID as a radio drama. Radio suited the material: no need for special effects, no need for a set — just voices, silence, and the listener's own imagination filling in the corners of the house. That version taught me something important. The story worked best when the audience was doing part of the work.

Movies show you everything. Radio makes you build it. And once I understood that, I could not un-see it. PARANOID was never meant to be watched. It was meant to be entered.

Why interactive fiction was always the answer

Interactive fiction — sometimes called a text adventure — is the oldest form of storytelling that still puts the reader inside the room. You are not watching Michael. You are Michael. You decide what to look at, what to pick up, who to talk to, and when to walk out the door. The house responds to you.

That is the exact machine PARANOID always wanted to be. A quiet suburban mystery told in prose, with a reader who is also a participant, on a device they already carry in their pocket.

After more than a decade of drafts, I stopped trying to make PARANOID into something it was not, and finally built it as what it always was: a piece of interactive fiction. Modern engines like Quest, and modern browsers that can run them anywhere, made it possible to ship the story the way it deserved — with no install, no download, and no barrier between the reader and the first line.

From script to browser

The bones of the original movie script are still in there. The single suburban location. The unreliable memory. The five-year-old accident that will not stay buried. What changed is the surface: instead of stage directions, PARANOID gives you rooms you can walk through, objects you can examine, and choices that shape which ending you reach.

If you have ever wondered what an interactive fiction mystery text adventure actually feels like in 2026 — no parser guessing, no dusty emulator, just a browser tab and a story that talks back — PARANOID is a good place to start.

Step inside the house

PARANOID is a dark suburban mystery, playable in any modern browser on phone, tablet, or desktop. It is a piece of interactive fiction thirteen years in the making — and about 120 minutes long once you sit down with it.