Archive for the ‘interviews’ Category

Adrian Hon, Perplex City

Thursday, May 5th, 2005
With recent developments surrounding 333 mysterious parcels being delivered to people around the world, and more specifically with the speculative meaning in the contents thereof, many questions were raised about the direction this game was taking. Perplex City is an ambitious project, first announced in February of 2004. In pre-game teaser episodes, it has run the standard alternate reality gaming gauntlet, from email puzzles and blogs to mysterious videos and live one-time events. These episodes have built a steady following among the ARG community over the past year. When a recent puzzle solution led to a sign-up page to receive a posted package, which turned out to contain a set of puzzle cards along with assorted Perplex City swag, chaos ensued as players tried to determine how they fit with the game so far.

Of course, the most obvious route to enlightenment was through Adrian Hon, currently known as "Executive Producer and Director of Play, Mind Candy Design" and the joint lead PuppetMaster behind this alternate reality game. It is unknown whether Mr. Hon was required to relinquish his duties as "Acting Ambassador Plenipotentiary to Perplex City" in order to take up his new post but we're hoping that, at the very least, the pay is better. Anyway, the point is he probably knows a thing or two about stuff and we figured he could set us straight.

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Gaming the Game

Saturday, April 12th, 2003
The Cloudmakers group was formed to solve the mystery surrounding the death of fictional character Evan Chan, which eventually turned out to be a game called "The Beast" by it's creators, and designed to promote the upcoming Steven Spielberg movie, A.I. The Cloudmakers group was formed on the Yahoo! Groups service on April 11, 2001.

On April 12, 2001, an individual appeared in the IRC chat room used by some of the Cloudmakers for real-time interaction. Known as "celia," this individual was first believed to be in-game due her strange conversational style and constant quoting from works and along themes that were also utilized within The Beast.

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Experience It! Exposed

Saturday, April 5th, 2003
by SpaceBass
Much of the focus lately in the world of Unfiction has been on the decided lack of campaigns that have enjoyed success on the order of the Beast. Certainly amongst the Cloudmakers, the main collective of players that followed the Beast, it's a bit harder to recognize success if it doesn't live up to the scale of that original experience.

However, there were two Alternate Reality Games recently that each culminated in a special event catering to the players. Both events featured bonus schwag being handed out to the attendees. Both events were part of a marketing campaign. And both campaigns were very successful, according to their developers.

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The Chase is On!

Saturday, April 5th, 2003
by Jonathan Waite, contributing author
Dave Szulborski took a smidgen of time out from his hectic day and replied to some questions about his wildly popular new ARG Chasing The Wish. We appreciate this intimate look into the Alternate Reality of his world.

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On Pixels, and Puzzles, and Pi

Thursday, January 2nd, 2003
Elonka Dunin was gracious enough to sit down and have a chat with me the other day. It started out as an interview but she turned the tables on me a few times and it ended up being more of a discussion of the ARG and MMORPG genres, cryptography, and puzzle creation.

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