|
WE’RE
watching a movie trailer: A party full of young, sexy
Manhattanites is suddenly disrupted by a massive
explosion. The revelers run into the street as someone
yells: “I saw it, it’s alive, it’s huge”—and the
disembodied head of the Statue of Liberty comes flying
down the street.
The
trailer reveals it’s for a 2008
Paramount film from wunderkind producer J.J. Abrams (Felicity,
Alias, Lost), and virtually no other
details, so we’re left wondering: What’s the name of the
movie? Who’s the villain? What freedom-hating beast(s)—HulkGodzillaKong?
the Cthulhu? Taliban evildoers?—would decapitate Lady
Liberty?
Abrams
may reveal all at Comic-Con 2007, the massive San Diego
convention where the entertainment industry touts
upcoming movies, television shows, games and more to the
120,000-strong gathering of the science fiction-comic
book-blogger-fanboy crowd. (He didn’t. At Comic-Con, he
resolutely referred to his unnamed movie with little
else but “this movie”—although he did tease that “we
need our own Godzilla.” The sold-out Comic-Con 2007 was
held from July 26 to 29.—Ed.)
But some
fans want to know more than what’s up with the movie. Go
online and you’ll find a group of people for whom the
biggest question is not: Whodunit? Rather, it’s: Hey, is
this trailer the first clue in the latest
alternate-reality game?
Alternate-reality games, for those unfamiliar with the
genre, are perhaps best illustrated with an actual
example: Imagine you find a web site. The owner says
it’s been hacked and she asks the online world for help.
People search the site and find corrupted data files,
and a countdown to the year 2552. The site is like many
small sites that run into tech problems and need help.
Except
the site is fake. The woman is fake. Stay with us here:
Her entire world is a fictional creation, a web of fake
sites and fake blogs, with more and more mysteries
slowly unraveling, as online participants decrypt codes
in the corrupted data files. As it happens, 2552 is the
year that an alien horde invades Earth in the Xbox
video-game series Halo. Indeed, the entire fictional
world was part of an alternate-reality game called I
Love Bees—promoting the 2004 launch of Halo 2 and
deepening the mythology of the Halo world—created by a
firm, 42 Entertainment, devoted exclusively to the
creation of “immersive entertainment.”
Many
fans found I Love Bees when an advertisement shown in
movie theaters for Halo 2 briefly flashed the URL of the
web site that was experiencing the problems—and would
spend the next four months unraveling the mysteries
within. (The initial mystery that kicks off an
alternate-reality game is known as the “rabbithole” or
“trailhead.” Die-hard fans are always on the prowl for
new games, but those new to the genre may stumble into a
game by Googling something that catches their
attention—a cryptic movie trailer, for example.)
Jonathan
Waite, the owner and senior editor of ARGNet, a news
site devoted to alternate-reality games that is one of
the hubs of the community, got involved with ARGs in
2001, when an elaborate game known as the Beast was
being produced to promote Steven Spielberg’s AI. The
movie’s posters featured clues that led to a chain of
web sites where players investigated an elaborate murder
mystery.
“It was
the creation of a new genre of gaming: a game that took
place in real time, across different media, using
different interaction methods, with real world
events—there were actual rallies in certain US cities
that took place that coincided with the game,” recalls
Waite, 30, an elementary-school teacher from La
Broquerie, Manitoba. “It really captured the imagination
of a lot of gamers.”
The
genre has since grown dramatically. The “puppet masters”
of the game for AI formed the Pasadena, California-based
42 Entertainment, which has a staff of 25 and has
produced a half-dozen other games in addition to I Love
Bees. Susan Bond, the firm’s chief production officer,
says that Bees drew an audience of around 2 million who
were involved at some level with the online experience,
according to the company’s internal data. Research from
42 Entertainment suggests that the players range in age
from 17 to 55, with an almost even split of male and
female players. “Great storytelling has a universal
appeal,” Bond says.
But 42
Entertainment is not behind the mysterious Abrams
trailers and sites: “Not something we’re involved with,”
Bond says. “It is interesting though, isn’t it?”
Abrams
has been known to dabble in this world before. His TV
show Lost last summer ran an alternate-reality game of
its own called the Lost Experience, from Hi-Res, a
London-based marketing firm. The game revolved around a
hacker who enlisted the help of the online community to
investigate Lost’s mysterious Hanso Foundation.
Hi-Res
denies that it’s involved in the new Abrams project,
according to Florian Schmitt, the firm’s creative
director, “though I don’t suppose we’d tell you if we
were.”
Paramount and Abrams’s production company Bad Robot were unavailable
for comment.
The
current mysterious movie trailer has the release date
“1-18-08.” Fans looking online found the web site
1-18-08.com, which featured pictures of the characters
in the trailer. Watching the trailer frame-by-frame,
some enthusiasts noticed that one of the characters was
wearing a T-shirt for Slusho, a fictional beverage that
had been mentioned in Alias. Online sleuthing led to the
web site slusho.jp, a promotional site for the
nonexistent Slurpee-like drink. Records showed that the
Slusho web site was registered before the trailer aired,
indicating that the site almost had to be official.
But
after the initial rush of discoveries, fans began to
question: Where is the rest of the game? Unforums.com, a
forum devoted to alternate-reality games, features more
than 6,000 posts—which have been viewed about 400,000
times—from players searching for clues since July 3,
when the trailer first appeared before the Transformers
movie.
If they
have indeed found a “rabbithole,” the fans do not know
how to enter, and they’re left hoping that J.J. Abrams
will unleash a white rabbit to lead the way. |
