Rand Miller, creator of the ARG?

Did you know Rand Miller (creator of Myst and Uru, of course) was possibly the first creator of the ARG (Alternate Reality Game)?  He wasn't sure of the dating of the preafter, can we get some help here to clean this up?  I got to sit in a great chat with Rand and Elan Lee (now of Fourth Wall) on the ARG, and what they'd both tried, and wanted to try in the future.  Mind boggling stuff from two geniuses in the design of this amazingly exciting experience form (boy, that was clumsy... I guess I'm still reeling, it was a heady chat).

Much more AGDC coming in the next day or so... our Uru Community panel was awesome.  Thanks to Blake Lewin for putting it together.  And it was great to hear Rand Miller talking about some of his design thoughts, though all the participants had great contributions (Eleri did a great job, loved her slides). 

Comments

[Keith]

I'm not sure of the exact date (without trawling through DRC archived forum posts) but I think it was around 2002 for preafter.

ARG's seem to have been around a while before that date.

preafter was great fun though, it was a great shame that something similar was not put in place for MOUL I think it really could have benefited from it.

[Zardoz]

The Zandi preafter ARG really began in 2001 at the 2001 Mysterium. Jeff Zandi was there, and the infamous billboard was in place, but none of the attendees noticed it. The DRC-related Zandi Preafter events started in the spring of 2002. My Zandi Facts webpage is still up (http://home.comcast.net/~zardoz99/Zandi/zandi_facts.htm and http://home.comcast.net/~zardoz99/Zandi/zandi.htm) - there are other sites that also chronicled the Zandi Preafter saga. Unfortunately, the best source of this history was the old DniGuild forums, which are buried somewhere in the so-called Cho server (cho.cyan.com). Those forums went down when Ubi Uru died, and are not to be found in the current DRC site forums. Too bad.

[Kaye]

Looks like you may be half right...

Gamasutra's feature on The Rise of ARGs cites "The Beast" as the first online rabbit hole (promoting the movie A.I.) in early 2001. It cites Jordan Weisman and Elan Lee as the creators.

http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20050509/hon_01.shtml

[ronmeiners]

OK, the story Rand told deserves its own post... see above.

And thanks all (and hey Zardoz! Great to see you.)

[mszv]

Hi,
The wikipedia entry is interesting, a bit unfocused, but interesting -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternate_reality_game

Wikipedia includes web alternate reality stuff, such as the very popular "Lonely Girl" series. I'm not sure I would have included that, but it's there. Lonely Girl was interesting - It was all fiction, but set out to be real. Oddly enough, it still had a following after the fiction part came out!

Here's another site on ARGs -
http://www.argn.com/

I'm not the best judge of what works and doesn't work in this realm. Zardoz followed the Zandi thing (intelligent as always, Zardoz!), but I never did. I'm somewhat ARG resistent. I think it's because my entertainment time is limited, and I prefer predictable entertainment, in terms of a time schedule. I also want to know who's doing it, and why, so I can be the judge of whether I want to participate. Secrecy does not do if for me - I won't play. If the ARG is for a commercial product, and you don't tell what it's for, up front, I feel manipulated. On the time thing, I want my entertainment to be there, and I want to have confidence that I can get enough to have a positive experience.

That's just me - it doens't say anything about other players.

If you are talking about extending the story of a commercial product into other areas - I'm rather fond of the way the TV network USA Networks does it- on their website. Using Burn Notice as an example, you can play games, get text messages about the show and send other people their own "Burn Notice". On Psych (also on USA networks), you can also do mashups.