Photo: Robert Maxwell
The initial clue was so subtle that for nearly two days nobody noticed it.
On February 10, 2007, the first night of Nine Inch Nails' European tour, T-shirts went on sale at a 19th-century Lisbon concert hall with what looked to be a printing error: R andom letters in the tour schedule on the back s e emed slightly boldfaced. Then a 27-year-old Lisbon photographer named Nuno Foros reali z ed that, strung together, the boldface letters spelled "i am tryi n g to believe." Foros posted a photo o f his T-shirt on the Spiral, the Nine Inch Nails fan fo r um. People started typing "iamtryingtobelieve.com" into t h eir Web browsers. That led them to a site denouncing something c a lled Parepin, a drug apparently intro d uced into the US water supply. Ostensibly, Parepin was an antidote to bioterror agent s, but in reality, the page declared, it was par t of a government plot to confuse and sedat e citizens. Email sent to the site's contact link generated a cry p tic auto-res p onse: "I'm drinking the water. So should you." Onlin e, fans worldwide debate d what this had to do with Nine Inch Nails. A setup for the next album? Some kind of interactive game? Or what?
A few days later, on February 14, a woman named Sue was about to wash a different T-shirt, which she had bought at one of the Lisbon shows, when she noticed that the tour dates included several boldface digits. Fans quickly interpreted this as a Los Angeles telephone number. People who called it heard a recording of a newscaster announc i ng, "Presidential address: America is born agai n," followed by a distorted snippet of wha t could only be a new Nine Inch Nails s o ng. Then, a woman named Ana reported finding a USB flash drive in a bathroom stall at the hall where the band had been playing. On the drive was a previously unreleased song, which she promptly uploaded. The metadata tag on the song contained a clue that led to a site displaying a glowing wheat field, with the lege n d "America Is Born Again." Clicking and dragging the mous e across the screen, ho w ever, revealed a much grimmer-looking site labeled "Another Version of the Truth." Clic k ing on that led to a forum about acts of underground res i stance.
All this activity had bee n set in motion months before. Trent Reznor, the singer — songwriter behin d Nine Inch Nails, had been recording Year Zero, a grimly futuristic suite evoking an America beset by terrorism, ravaged by climate change, and ruled by a Christian military dictatorship. "But I had a problem," he recalls, l o unging on a second- f loor deck of the house he's remodeling in Beverly Hills: how to provide context for the songs. In the '60s, concept albums came with extens i ve liner n otes and lots of artwork. MP3s don't have tha t. "So I started thinking about how to mak e the world's most elaborate album cove r," he says, "using the media of today."
Ye a rs earlier, Reznor had heard about a c omplex game played out over many months, bo t h online and in the real world, in which mill i ons of people across the planet had collecti v ely solved a cascading series ofpuzzl e s, riddles, and treasure hunts that ultimately tied into the Steven Spielberg movie AI: Artificial Intelligence. Developed by Jordan Weisman, then a Microso f t exec, it was the f i rst of what c ame to be called alternate reali t y games — ARGs for short. After leav i ng Redmond, Weisman founded a c o mpany called 42 Entertainme n t, which made ARGs for products ranging from Windows Vista to Pirates of the Caribbean : Dead Man's Chest. Reznor wanted to give his fans a taste o f life in a massively dysfunctio n al theocratic police state, and h e decided that a game involving millions of players w orldwide would help him do t h at in a big way.
Reznor was st e pping into a new kind of inte r active fiction. These narrativ e s unfold in fragments, in all sorts of media, from Web sites to phone calls to live events, and the audience pieces together the story from shards of information. The task is too complicated for any one person, but the Web enables a collective intelligence to emerge to assemble the pieces, solve the mysteries, and in the p rocess, tell and retell the story on l ine. The narrative is shaped — and ultimately owned — by the a udience in ways that other forms of stor y telling cannot match. No longer passiv e consumers, the players live out the story. Eight yea r s ago, this kind of entertainment didn't exi s t; now dozens of such games are launched every year, many of them attracting millions of followers on every continent.
How could this work for Year Zero? Reznor had spent a long time thinking and writing about the future dystopia he imagined. Now he wanted to share this story with his fans. He filled in the contact form on 42 Entertainment's Web site and clicked Send.
Alex Lieu, Susan Bonds, and Jordan Weisman of 42 Entertainment, which pioneered alternate reality games. Photo: Robert Maxwell
When Weisman opened Reznor's email at his lakefront house near Seattle, he ha d barely heard of Nine Inch Nails. Slender and s o ft-spoken, with curly dark hair and a salt-a n d-pepper beard that gives him a vaguely Talmudic appearance, he ' s not big on hardcore indus t rial rock. His experience is more in game design and social inter-action, two fields he views as intimately con j oined. "Games are about engaging with the most entertaining thing on the planet," he says, sipping coffee in his g u esthouse, "which is other people."
In 2001, Weisman wa s creative director of Microsoft's enter t ainment division, which was developing the Xbox and a number of videogames — including one based on AI — to support its launch. The AI game never materialized, but the ARG Weisman created was p henomenally successful. He left Microsoft and in 2003 decided to do ARGs full-time, launching 42 Entertainment as a boutique m a rketing firm. He took the name from The Hitchhiker' s Guide to the Galaxy, which maintain s that "the Answer to the Ultimate Quest i on of Life, the Uni v erse, and Everything" is in fact 42. Th e company's first game, ilovebees, had peop l e answering pa y phones around the world in the weeks leading up to the release of Halo 2. One player even braved a Florida hurricane to take a call in a Burger King parking lot.
Similar games have been used to launch scores of products in the years since. GMD Studios, a Florida outfit, staged a fake auto theft to begin a game for Audi that drew more than 500,000 players. A London studio called Hi-Res used television ads and specially made chocolate bars, among other things, in a still-talked-about game touting JJ Abrams' Lost. More recently, someone — not 42 — has been planting enigmatic clues on Web sites and fake MySpace profiles to promote a film Abrams is producing that so far is best known by the c odename Cl o verfield. What's all this about a Japa n ese drink called Slusho? And what doe s it have to do with the s u dden appearance of a Godzilla-like m onster in N e w York Harbor? Abrams fans have been falling all over themselves to figure it out.
"When done well, ARGs can be extraordinarily effective," says Ty Montague, creative director of the J. Walter Thompson ad agency. That's because the games offer marketers a solution to a growing problem: how to reach people who are so media-satura t ed they block all attempts to get t h rough. "Your brain filters it out, because oth e rwise you'd go crazy," Weisman says. That's why he opted for a "subdural" approach: Instead of shouting the message, hide it. "I figured that if the audience discovered something, they would share it," he explains, "because we all need something to talk about."
The ARG for AI began with an ob s cure credit for a "sentient machine therapis t" in both the trailer and a prerelease prom o tional poste r. Soon someone — all signs point to a member of Weisman's group — wrote Harr y Knowles at Ain't It Cool News, suggesting he Google the therapist's name. That led to a maze of bizarre Web sites about robot rights and a phone number that, when called, played a message from a woman whose husband had just died in a suspicious boating accident. Within 24 hours, thousands of people were trying to figure out what had happened.
Weisman had long been working toward that moment. Severely dyslexic as a kid, his world changed when he was introduced to Dungeons & Dragons. "Here was entertainment that involved problem solving and was story-based and social," he says."It totally put my brain on fire. What we're doing now is a giant extrapolation of sitting in the kitchen playing D&D with friends. It's just that now our kitchen table holds 3 million people" — the number that ultimately engaged with the AI game.
During the development of that first A R G, Weisman argued that no puzzle wo u ld be too hard, n o clue too obscure, because with so many people collaborating online, the players would have access to every conceivable skill se t. Where he erred was in not following t h at idea to its logical conclusion. "Not only do they have eve r y skill on the planet," he says, "they have unlimited res o urces, unlimited time, and u nlimited money. Not only can they solve anythin g, they can solve anything instantly." Weisman dubbed h is game the Beast, because originally it had 666 pieces of content. But a s the players burned through those and clamored for more, the name took on a different meaning. He had created a mon s ter.
Weisman and S p ielberg viewed the Beast as an ext e nsion of AI. But the bill to fund it c ame out of the film's marketing budget, and t he ARG certainly created buzz for the movie. Meanwhile, the Inte r net was transf o rming marketin g. Western commerce had been built on a clea r proposition: I give you money, you give me something else of v a lue. But like a rug merchant who offers pros p ective buyers tea before discussing h is wares, the Internet was beginning to engage and entertain customers — whether with free singles on iTunes or an ARG that could run for months — before asking them to part with their money. "All marketing," Weisman says, "is headed in that direction."
For Nine Inch Nails fans, the unfolding of the Year Zero game was as puzzling as i t was exciting. "We didn't know w h ere it would go," says Cameron Ladd, a 19-y e ar-old community college student in rural Ohio who helps moderate the Nine Inch Nails fan forum Echoing the Sound. "We had no idea of the scope. That was the most fun — not knowing what would come next." Debates raged as to whether it had anything to do with Philip K. Di c k or the Bible, how it compa r ed with Children of Men or V for Vendetta, and why the Year Zero Web s i tes kept referring to something c alled the Presence, which appeared to be a giant hand reaching down from the s k y. The band's European tour dates becam e the object of obsessive atten t ion. "It was like, bang-bang-bang — there were so many things happening at once," Ladd say s. "It was one gigantic burst o f excitement."
Fans in E u rope were so eager to find new flash drives that they ra n for the toilets the moment the concert venue d oor s opened. On February 18, at the Sala Razzmatazz in Ba r celona, someone scored. The drive contain e d an MP3 file of a new Nine Inch Nails s ong that trailed off into the sound of crickets.
But when the cricket s o unds were run through a spectrograph, they yie l ded a series of blips that gradually resol v ed into a phone number in Clev e land, Ohio. People who d ialed this number (and some 1.7 million did) heard a horrific recording from a mysterious organizat i on called US Wiretap: a young woma n on her cell phone at an underground nigh t club, with shrieking and gunshots in the backgr o und, screaming hysterically that someone had come into the club a nd killed her friend and that the cops had locked everybody inside and she was going to die.
A visit to uswiretap.com ("A Partnership C orporation of the Bureau of Mora l ity") r ev ealed that federal agents had bolt e d the doors to the club, a known "resistance" hangout, whi l e the 112 people inside spent two days te a ring one another to shreds in a mad fre n zy.
The clues on the flash d rives were typical of what makes a good ARG work. They were hard to spot and even harder to decipher, but because the narrative was being pieced together online, you didn't have to be a propellerhead to follow it. "Our assumption," says Sean Stewart, the game's head writer, "was never that there's a continent of p eople who love nothing better t h an to do spectrogram analysis. But there are always a few, and if y o u make a world that's compelling e n ough, there'll be a lot to do even if you're not int e rested in the really arcane stuff."
Most fans didn't realize their progress was being monitored nonstop. Unlike less interactive forms of entertainment, ARGs require a close collaboration between the puppet masters — the unseen figures who create the story — and the audience. "The makers 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 to his hotel so he could watch the action on fan forums and in chat rooms unfold on his laptop. "I couldn't wait," Reznor says. "'Did they find it? Did they find it?' I know it sounds nerdy, but it was exciting." The 42 Entertainment team, working out of a cramped loft in downtown Pasadena, California, kept an eve n closer watch. They had to make sure the players didn't get fr u strated or go too far down a wrong path.
It didn't take long to spot the first proble m. On several sites, brief snippets of text from mildly su b versive books — One Flew Over the Cuckoo's N e st, Slaughterhouse-Five, Heather Has Two Mommies — had been scanned into the backg r ound to provide visual interest. Players, however, were interpreting them as clues and trying to figure out what they meant.
At 42 Entertainment, panic set in. "It's a silent contract," explains Steve Peters, the game designer charged with tracking player progress. "We respect you — which means we're not going to lead you along by the nose and then not give you anything." T hey decided to add a clue suggesting that t h e texts were from banned books.
Ther e were more complications to come. Reznor presumed that weeks before the CD reached Wal-Mart and Best Buy, someone would upload it to the BitTorrent sites, which his most avid fans would be carefully monitoring. So he planted hints in the music — a few seconds recorded out of phase on "The Great Destroyer," for instance. Played on a monaural device, the music briefly canceled itself out, leaving nothing except a barely audible voice saying something like "red horse vector." At redhorsevector.net, players would find a top-secret report suggesting the source of the nightclub massacre — a weaponized virus called Red Horse that caused acute homicidal psychosis.
Surprisingly, though, no one was uploading the album. Reznor had assumed it would hit the peer-to-peer sites by mid-March, but at the end of that month there was still no sign of it. Without the music, only a handful of new clues were coming out. "The fans were getting antsy," says Alex Lieu, 4 2 Entertainment's creative director. "So were we. Trent was stunned. And the whole time we were thinking, 'When is so m eone go i ng to stea l this a l bum?'"
Reznor would like to make one th i ng about the Year Zer o game perfectly clear: "It's not fucki n g marketing. I'm not trying to sell anything." That's why he p aid for the game himself, out of his r e cording budget. For a while, he didn't even tell his label what he was d o ing. But the game was extremely effective at generating excitement. Every time a song was leaked, the message boards were swamped. By the time the album hit store shelves in A p ril, 2.5 million people had visited at l east one of the game's 30 Web sites. The buzz was so great that Int e rscope chair Jimmy Iovine — Reznor's label boss at Universal Music at the time — called Weisman to talk about buying 42 Entertainment.
From 42's perspective, it hardly matters w het h er you call the game "marketing" o r not. What matters is that someone — Reznor, Microsoft, Disney — writes a c heck. And, for now, the checks gener a lly come from companies trying to se ll something. As a r e sult, many ARG d evelopers want to break out of marketing entirely and find another way to make money. Novel i s t s, film directors, and television producers get to tell their own stories; w h y not ARG-makers? GMD Studios, th e comp a ny behind the ARG fo r Au d i, has been running a game that it hopes will spawn graphic novels and maybe a TV show. In Sep t ember, Stewart and two ot h er longtime associates of W e isman's left 42 Entertainment to s tart a new c o mpany, Fourth Wall St u dios, with similar ambitions.
So far, however, no o n e has manage d to create an ARG that can sustain itself through advertising, subscripti o n f ees, or any other model. The most ambitious attempt was Perplex City, a v a st treasure hunt staged by a London company called Mind Candy, which has received $10 million in venture capital — a first in ARG-land. Perplex City w as said to be a locale in an alternate universe wh o se most powerful artifact, a polished m etal cube, had been stolen and buried somewhere on E a rth; whoever fou n d it stood to receive a $200,000 reward. Clues were hidden on a series of c a rds sold in toy shops, bookstores, and online for abou t $1 apiece.
VCs had visions of Pokémon dancing in their he a ds. But though 50,000 people in 92 countries registered for the game, the cards turned out to be difficult and expensive to produce. Last Ju n e, not long after the cube was unearthed i n a forest in England, a planned second season was abruptly canceled. "I'm still convinced there are excitin g commercial models that no one h as found just yet," says Michael Smith, Mind Candy's CEO. "I t 's a wonderful world we created, and I very, very much want to relaunch it." Unfortunately, he doesn't know when that will happen.
As the album's release date approached, the game hit the peer-to-peer sites and regained its momentum. Reznor and the team from 42 Entertainment had a c ritical p l anning session in London to figure out a way to wrap it up. Elan Lee, the game's chief designer, s u ggested an explosive finale: Stage a surprise concert and b low up a building on the way out. A building? Reznor was awestruck: "These are my kind of people!"
"I'm still trying to work an actual cadaver into a campaign," Lieu says. "You'd think Year Zero would be the one, but it wasn't."
Blowing up a building wasn't practical, so they came up with s omething else. On April 13, all the players w h o had signed up at a subversive site called Open Source Resistance we r e invited to gather beneath a mural i n Hollywood. Some of those who showed up w e re given cell phones and told to k eep them on at all t i mes. Five days later, the pho n es ran g. The players were told to report to a parking lot, where t hey were loaded onto a ram-shackle bus wit h blacked-out windows.
The bus delivered them a t twilight to wha t appeared to be an abandoned warehouse near some railroad tracks. Armed men patrolled the roof. The 50-odd player s were led up a ramp and into a large, dark room w h ere the leader of Open Source Resistance (actually an actor) gave a sp e ech about the importance of making themselves heard. Then they w ere led through a maze of rooms and deposited in front of — a row of a mps?
With the s udden crack of a drumbeat, Nine Inch Nails materialized onstage and broke into "The Beginning of the End," a song they had never before played in the US. "This is the beginning," Reznor intoned, as guitar chords strafed the room. He got out one, two, three, four more songs before the SWAT team arrived. Then, as flashing li g hts and flash bombs filled the room, men in ri o t gear stormed the stage. "Run for the bus!" someone yelled, and the players started spr i nti n g. The bus sped them back to the parkin g lot and the cars that would take them safely home. But before they drove away, they were told they'd be contacted again.
Now that the album is out, the game has gone cold. "I don' t know if the audience was ready for it t o end," says Susan Bonds, the president of 42 Entertainment. "But we always expecte d to pick it up again." Reznor, after all, had conce i ved Year Zero as a two-part album. "Thos e phones are still out there," she adds. "The minutes have expired. But we could buy new minutes at any point."
Contributing editor Frank Rose (frank_rose@wired.com) wrote about 3-D movies in issue 15.11.
Related Interview: Trent Reznor on Year Zero, Planting Clues, and What's Ludicrous About Being a Musician Today…- .. -.. . —: .-..-. .-. . -.. / …. — .-. … . / …- . -.-. – — .-. .-..-.…- .. -.. . —: .-..-. – …. . / -… . –. .. -. -. .. -. –. / — ..-. / – …. . / . -. -.. .-..-.NinWiki: Guide to Year Zero[#iframe: https://more-deals.info/wp-content/uploads/archive/images/multimedia/magazine/1601/ff_arg24_3_1.mp3?_=1]
