Jon Braver on The Blue Blade’s Alt Delete and the future of Delusion

Jon Braver, the creator of Delusion, has teamed up with The Great Company to bring another chapter to the Blue Blade, an interactive theater experience filled with adventure and time travel. Alt Delete is a sci-fi micro experience where a small group is tasked with erasing traces of time traveling. The preview weekend is currently happening, and it’ll be premiering officially on October 9, 2019, at the Dragon & Meeple in Los Angeles.

With Braver behind the scenes, it can be easy to think that Alt Delete will be another dark experience similar to Delusion. He has made it clear that this is a different type of show.

“This is not a Delusion production,” Braver tells Nerd Reactor. “It’s a Great Company production of Alt Delete. It’s a new experiment for us. I’m writing and directing it. For all intents and purposes, Delusion doesn’t have a show this year. This is another experience – a Great Company and the creator of Delusion. That’s what this is. We want to make sure that expectations are understood. It’s a far cheaper ticket than a standard, hour-long Delusion production. That should tell you something right there. We just want to have fun and try a new experiment while we’re continually looking for other venues for larger-scale shows, like a classic horror show. The next Delusion production would be a horror show. We’ll probably bring back one of the older shows that we were doing. Remount some of those, because there are five really great stories that we could bring back.”

Alt Delete is a new chapter in the Blue Blade saga, and fans of the interactive adventure will appreciate it as well as new fans.

“You can just come in here, and there’s a mystery and there’s depth to it,” Braver explained. “For people who have been to the show, Blue Blade, it’s great. They have some experience with one of the characters that they’ll meet. But at the end of the day, it’s standalone. Come here, you do a cool, clandestine, time-traveling experience in a very cool, gaming restaurant. You have a 20-minute show, you have incredible food and you have the games here, so this is like a whole evening of entertainment in a different way that Delusion has done in the past – because again, it’s not a Delusion production.”

Since Alt Delete is a shorter experience compared to The Blue Blade and Delusion, it will also have a smaller group of 6 people at a time. Whereas the previous shows would have a group of 8 to 10. That also meant a quicker turnaround time for writing the show.

“This happened fast,” Braver recalled. “It usually takes me a while to write. I’m not a fast writer because I like to take my time and think about it. This one is like a couple of weeks. Bust something out quick because there are all these things that have to go into place, like getting a production designer on board and start sourcing material. That whole process had to happen really fast to make this happen.”

In the Blue Blade Saga, Evelyn Lowell is a rogue scientist who has created a black market time travel business thanks to the Blue Blade, a powerful artifact. However, time-traveling does leave a path for her enemies, and in Alt Delete, it’s your job to remove the path.

“What if Evelyn Lowell had an insurance policy and had Underwriters working for her,” Braver teases about the story. “I put the audience as the characters of the Underwriters. In the previous shows, they were working for The Safeguard Society that was trying to track her down. This time around, we’re in 1982, and you are working for her. She’s very mysterious, and you may or may not come in contact with her. There’s been a breach in her lab, and you’re going back to clean it up, erase all the files and cover her tracks.”

Braver plans to work on future Delusion shows, and he discusses the challenges in bringing a proper interactive horror experience in Los Angeles.

“The venue has to be right,” the creator said. “LA is just a tough place to lock venues down. It’s funny because if we go back to the history of Delusion, we set ourselves up with such high standards with whole houses that we were just able to get. There was no spotlight on us and nobody gave a shit about it. The city was easy, the fire department worked with us. We got our permits relatively easy. And then every year it went on, it became a little bit harder, harder and harder. People just weren’t happy about us existing in these old homes. Now it’s become almost impossible. But the business model for that too is kind of shitty. You can only be there for a certain amount of time, and you can only have a certain amount of people. We want to maintain the integrity of Delusion by having low capacity. That’s pretty important, and that means a lot higher ticket prices. To be honest, the next show – the big horror show – we could charge $135 or $150. I think people would go. It’s proven and I think we earned that.”

With Los Angeles being a tough area for venues, the future of Delusion and The Blue Blade may include cities in other states.

“New Orleans would be sick! Braver shouted. “There are so many great spaces. We could buy a house in Atlanta for $50-$60k. You have it. You’re done. The ideal scenario would be to build a mansion that’s flexible. We could bring back 2011 and 2012. Not 2013 because that was in a church.”

Alt Delete will officially start on October 9th at the Dragon & Meeple (3742 S Flower St., Los Angeles, CA 90007). For tickets, visit https://www.bluebladesaga.com/.