Jacob's Ladder

Turn-of-the-Century Anxieties: Sanitarium and the Recovery of American Identity

Wojciech Sitek's article reads the 1998 adventure game Sanitarium (DreamForge Intertainment) as a cultural artifact of late-1990s American anxieties, arguing that the game's psychiatric-hospital setting, fragmented narrative, and apocalyptic undertones express a collective unease about national identity as the millennium…

• Sitek reads the 1998 adventure game Sanitarium (DreamForge Intertainment) as a cultural artifact of late-1990s American anxieties about national identity as the millennium approached.
• The article argues the game confronts national historical failures and warns of collapse, but ultimately offers a hopeful vision of renewal grounded in individualism and free-market values.
• Sanitarium's critique of late-capitalist America covers privatized healthcare, corporate exploitation, and buried traumas such as the treatment of Native Americans and human experimentation.