The TRUE STORY behind 99 Nights in the Forest’s lore

Get to know about the true story that inspired 99 Nights in the Forest, one of the most-played games on the Roblox platform right now.

Every time you open 99 Nights in the Forest, you’ll always get welcomed by a play panel, with a top text saying, “THIS GAME IS BASED ON A TRUE STORY. SOME DETAILS HAVE BEEN CHANGED.” 

While this might sound like a flavor text meant to make the game much more compelling and scarier, there’s actually a layer of truth to it.

Setting all the fictional creatures aside, here is the real incident that sparked the creativity of Grandma’s Favourite games for developing 99 Nights in the Forest.

This story goes all the way back to 2023, when a Cessna plane travelling to the Colombian town of San José del Guaviare crashed in the dense jungle of the Amazon on May 1, killing all three of its adult passengers.

One of the adult passengers, Magdalena Mucutuy Valencia, was with her four children during the plane crash. However, when the authorities discovered the remnants of the plane 16 days later, they didn’t find any sign of the children; only the bodies of Valencia, the plane’s pilot, and another passenger who is a native Colombian indigenous leader.

A massive search and rescue team, made up of the Colombian armed forces and indigenous trackers, spread out across the crash site to find the missing children. The children are ages 13, 9, and 4, with the youngest one being a 1-year-old toddler.

Finding the children proved to be a difficult task due to the challenging terrain and the presence of wild animals in the area. Weeks have passed, but no one has found any lead to the children’s whereabouts.

Just as the search party is about to lose hope, they eventually discover the children three miles from the plane’s location — all are weakened by dehydration but are generally well and safe from other dangers.

Amazingly, the children survived a total of 40 days by consuming cassava flour that they found on the plane’s wreckage. After running out of cassava flour, they resorted to eating fruits and seeds that they found all around the forest.

According to the reports, the children’s ancestry and heritage also played a major part in their survival, as they belong to the Huitoto indigenous group, who are known for their deep knowledge of the Amazon rainforest. The eldest of the children applied all the survival skills she learned from her mother to keep herself and all of her siblings alive during the ordeal.

All four children were immediately rescued and sent to the hospital, where they stayed for weeks. Many Colombians, including the president, celebrated their safe return, saying that their story will be remembered in history.

Several elements from the story above appear in 99 Nights in the Forest. Most notably, players are tasked with rescuing four children, clearly inspired by the real-life survivors of the 2023 Amazon plane crash.

From another perspective, we can also say that our in-game experience of surviving in a forest for multiple days and nights, albeit in a more dangerous scenario with the monsters around, is akin to what the four children faced during their days in the Amazon forest. You get to manage your hunger level by eating berries and fending off wild predators coming to your camp.

And lastly, if you haven’t realized already, you can find several broken planes in 99 Nights in the Forest, which is clearly inspired by the story’s plane crash incident. These areas in the game are often the best places to find valuable resources, such as chests, fuel, coal, bandages, and other metal scraps.

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