Alex Lieu, Susan Bonds, and JordanWeisman of 42 Entertainment, whichpioneered alternate reality games.of Halo 2. One player even braveda Florida hurricane to take a callin a Burger King parking lot.Similar games have beenused to launch scores of productsin the years since. GMD Studios,a Florida outfit, staged afake auto theft to begin a gamefor Audi that drew more than500,000 players. A London studiocalled Hi-Res used televisionads and specially made chocolatebars, among other things,in a still-talked-about gametouting JJ Abrams’ Lost. Morerecently, someone—not 42—hasbeen planting enigmatic clues onWeb sites and fake My Space profilesto promote a film Abramsis producing that so far is bestknown by the codename Cloverfield.What’s all this about aJapa nese drink called Slusho?And what does it have to dowith the sudden appearance ofa Godzilla-like monster in NewYork Harbor? Abrams fans havebeen falling all over themselvesto figure it out.“When done well, ARGs can beextraordinarily effective,” says TyMontague, creative director of theJ. Walter Thompson ad agency.That’s because the games offermarketers a solution to a growingproblem: how to reach peoplewho are so media-saturated theyblock all attempts to get through.reznor Grooming by Cori Bardo for Redken/celestineagency.comhen weisman opened Reznor’s emailat his lakefront house near Seattle,he had barely heard of Nine Inch Nails. Slenderand soft-spoken, with curly dark hairand a salt-and-pepper beard that gives hima vaguely Talmudic appearance, he’s not bigon hardcore industrial rock. His experienceis more in game design and social interaction,two fields he views as intimatelyconjoined. “Games are about engaging withthe most entertaining thing on the planet,”he says, sipping coffee in his guesthouse,“which is other people.”In 2001, Weisman was creative directorof Microsoft’s entertainment division,which was developing the Xbox and a numberof video games—including one basedon AI—to support its launch. The AI gamenever materi alized, but the ARG Weismancreated was phenomenally successful.He left Microsoft and in 2003 decidedto do ARGs full-time, launching 42 Entertainmentas a boutique marketing firm. Hetook the name from The Hitchhiker’s Guideto the Galaxy, which maintains that “theAnswer to the Ultimate Question of Life,the Universe, and Everything” is in fact 42.The company’s first game, ilovebees, hadpeople answering pay phones around theworld in the weeks leading up to the release“Your brain filters it out, because otherwiseyou’d go crazy,” Weisman says. That’s why heopted for a “subdural” approach: Instead ofshouting the message, hide it. “I figured thatif the audience discovered something, theywould share it,” he explains, “because we allneed something to talk about.”The ARG for AI began with an obscurecredit for a “sentient machine therapist” inboth the trailer and a prerelease promotionalposter. Soon someone—all signs point to amember of Weisman’s group—wrote HarryKnowles at Ain’t It Cool News, suggesting heGoogle the therapist’s name. That led to amaze of bizarre Web sites about robot rights
and a phone number that, when called, playeda message from a woman whose husband hadjust died in a suspicious boating accident.Within 24 hours, thousands of people weretrying to figure out what had happened.Weisman had long been working towardthat moment. Severely dyslexic as a kid, hisworld changed when he was introduced toDungeons & Dragons. “Here was entertainmentthat involved problem solving and wasstory-based and social,” he says. “It totallyput my brain on fire. What we’re doing now isa giant extrapolation of sitting in the kitchenplaying D&D with friends. It’s just that nowour kitchen table holds 3 million people”—the number that ultimately engaged withthe AI game.During the development of that first ARG,Weisman argued that no puzzle would be toohard, no clue too obscure, because with somany people collaborating online, the playerswould have access to every conceivableskill set. Where he erred was in not followingthat idea to its logical conclusion. “Notonly do they have every skill on the planet,”he says, “they have unlimited resources,unlimited time, and unlimited money. Notonly can they solve anything, they can solveanything instantly.” Weisman dubbed hisgame the Beast, because originally it had 666pieces of content. But as the players burnedthrough those and clamored for more, thename took on a different meaning. He hadcreated a monster.Weisman and Spielberg viewed the Beastas an extension of AI. But the bill to fund itcame out of the film’s marketing budget,and the ARG certainly created buzz for themovie. Meanwhile, the Internet was transformingmarketing. Western commerce hadbeen built on a clear proposition: I give youmoney, you give me something else of value.But like a rug merchant who offers prospectivebuyers tea before discussing his wares,the Internet was beginning to engage andentertain customers—whether with freesingles on iTunes or an ARG that could runfor months—before asking them to part withtheir money. “All marketing,” Weisman says,“is headed in that direction.”or nine inch nails fans, the unfoldingof the Year Zero game was as puzzlingas it was exciting. “We didn’t knowwhere it would go,” says Cameron Ladd,a 19-year-old community college studentin rural Ohio who helps moderate the NineInch Nails fan forum Echoing the Sound. “Wehad no idea of the scope. That was the mostfun—not knowing what would come next.”Debates raged as to whether it had anythingto do with Philip K. Dick or the Bible, how itcompared with Children of Men or V for Vendetta,and why the Year Zero Web sites keptreferring to something called the Presence,which appeared to be a giant hand reachingdown from the sky. The band’s Europeantour dates became the object of obsessiveattention. “It was like, bang-bang-bang—there were so many things happening atonce,” Ladd says. “It was one gigantic burstof excitement.”Fans in Europe were so eager to find newflash drives that they ran for the toilets themoment the concert venue doors opened.On February 18, at the Sala Razzmatazzin Barcelona, someone scored. The drivecontained an MP3 file of a new Nine InchNails song that trailed off into the sound ofcrickets. But when the cricket sounds wererun through a spectro graph, they yielded aseries of blips that gradually resolved intoa phone number in Cleveland, Ohio. Peoplewho dialed this number (and some 1.7 milliondid) heard a horrific recording from amysterious organization called US Wiretap:a young woman on her cell phone atan underground nightclub, with shriekingand gunshots in the background, screaminghysterically that someone had come intothe club and killed her friend and that thecops had locked everybody inside and shewas going to die. A visit to uswiretap.com(“A Partnership Corporation of the Bureauof Morality”) revealed that federal agentshad bolted the doors to the club, a known“resistance” hangout, while the 112 peopleinside spent two days tearing one anotherto shreds in a mad frenzy.The clues on the flash drives were typicalof what makes a good ARG work. They werehard to spot and even harder to decipher,but because the narrative was being piecedtogether online, you didn’t have to be a propellerheadto follow it. “Our assumption,”says Sean Stewart, the game’s head writer,“was never that there’s a continent of peoplewho love nothing better than to do spectrogramanalysis. But there are always a few,and if you make a world that’s compellingenough, there’ll be a lot to do even if you’renot interested in the really arcane stuff.”Most fans didn’t realize their progresswas being monitored nonstop. Unlike lessinteractive forms of entertainment, ARGsrequire a close collaboration between thepuppet masters—the unseen figures whocreate the story—and the audience. “Themakers and the consumers are in a tango,”Stewart says. “It’s a dance, it’s passionate,and sometimes there are sinister overtones.It creates a unique dynamic.”After every gig, Reznor rushed back tohis hotel so he could watch the action onfan forums and in chat rooms unfold on hislaptop. “I couldn’t wait,” Reznor says. “‘Didthey find it? Did they find it?’ I know it soundsnerdy, but it was exciting.” The 42 Entertainmentteam, working out of a cramped loftin downtown Pasadena, California, kept aneven closer watch. They had to make surethe players didn’t get frustrated or go toofar down a wrong path.It didn’t take long to spot the first problem.On several sites, brief snippets of textfrom mildly subversive books—One FlewOver the Cuckoo’s Nest, Slaughterhouse-Five, Heather Has Two Mommies—had beenscanned into the background to providevisual interest. Players, however, were interpretingthem as clues and trying to figureout what they meant.At 42 Entertainment, panic set in. “It’sa silent contract,” explains Steve Peters,the game designer charged with trackingplayer progress. “We respect you—whichmeans we’re not going to lead you along bythe nose and then not give you anything.”They decided to add a clue suggesting thatthe texts were from banned books.There were more complications to come.Reznor presumed that weeks before the CD.--- .- -. ..--- ----- ----- ---..
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