ARGs: A lost art

Posted by bilingue | 1 comment

Is the middle of the night and the phone rings, upset and disoriented, you search with your hands for the phone until you find it.  A trembled voice answers the phone, it is a girl you have never heard, the conversation ends and now your heart is pounding; you can’t go back to sleep, the end of the conversation haunts your mind:

-”Just be careful…. OH MY GOD THEY ARE HERE!! THEY ARE …..“- everything gets cut off by what you think is the sound of an helicopter and people trying to break in.  Is this a dream?

A couple of days later you received another call from a professor, advising you to stop any kind of contact and he promptly ends the call.  Next day at work the boss calls you:

-”Hey you received this fax, did you know him?”

Having no clue you take the paper from his hand and you get pale as soon as the name in the pictures triggers a memory in your brain.  It was the same professor that called yesterday and now he is dead; it looks as suicided, but you know that is not true; something is going on.

That my friends was Majestic, a long forgotten game that had a short life.  Majestic was part of a group of games called ARGs and in my opinion (just like Asherons Call 2) was ahead of its time.  It was just a game, but the constant “unexpected” created a lot of tension for me.  I knew it was not real but I could not stop the feeling that maybe… maybe some of it was true.

Artenate Reality Games use the real world as a platform and incorporates media elements (internet, emails, tv, ads, etc) to move the story forward in real time.  The game consisted of a copy of AIM, a web browser and a small computer application.  The base element was solving puzzles and clues via Video Chats, emails, faxes, webpages and phone calls.   Some famous ARGs were spawned by the movie A.I. and the TV series Lost, among others.

The trailer was kinda cheesy, and tried to emulate an X-files vibe:

This kind of innovation is lacking in games (specially in the MMO genre), and is something that developers should keep searching.  Something that World of Warcraft did right was to implement all those things that made different games unique and combine it together.  There shouldn’t be a feud about “who stole what” because in the end a new generation of “mmoers” benefited from it.  Taking a break, and looking back at lost, forgotten games is not a bad idea; maybe that is exactly what developers need to do in order to refresh, polish and somehow come with better ideas in this tough business that is the MMO genre.

-B