Jaded Viewer Rewind: EA's Majestic plays YOU!!!

I'm going all nostalgic here but I hope that a few of you remember a game back in 2001 called Majestic from Electronic Arts. Maybe even some of you played the game. Well I did. It was the first mass marketed ARG (Alternate Reality Game) that took full advantage of the Internet. But the Internet back in 2001 was quite different from what it is today. High speed Internet was a luxury and streaming video was well in its infancy (the predominant video player of choice was called REAL player) but we did have AOL Instant Messenger which was at the time the social networking communication tool of choice.

So what's Majestic?

It was a sci fi conspiracy game that utilized different forms of real life communication. The game was played with:

• Majestic Navigation System (on your PC) (either bought through EA or downloaded)
• Secret web pages
  
• AOL Instant Messenger
• Phone
• Fax
• E-mail
• PDA (do you younglings even know what that is?)
  

You could option how you wanted to be communicated but to get the magnitude of the game I turned on everything.....at work! I worked for a dot com back then and figured it'd be fun to get weird IMs, mysterious phone calls and crazy e-mails from strangers who were involved in a government conspiracy that needed my help.

And that's how the game was played. You had to help these characters (played by various actors including Joe Pantoliano) who would direct you to different puzzles and clues. For instance you'd have to view a video and then "hack" into a government encrypted file.

The game took place in real time. If a character told you they would contact you the next day at a particular time, they would. To me that was the fun part. I would get random calls at work with a woman screaming "They're after me! I don't know how they found me! I need your help!"

You'd get e-mails with FBI letter heads and links to webpages that had something revolving UFO's and many links to radio talk show host Art Bell. The beauty of the game was at the beginning, a message from EA told you the game was suspended (check this link out).

Slowly, people would contact you over a few days leading you to the next clue.

I remember some of the clues were fuckin hard. Part of the community that grew from Majestic players was that people who were on the same level as you could be contacted via forums, message boards and AIM to help. Some of the puzzles were easy, others you had to look really closely at to figure out what to do next. Remember that Lost ARG? It was in the same vain. I remember you had to enter a combination of passwords with the password clues hidden in various messages.

Sadly Majestic was discontinued after 9/11 (I guess the paranoia hit close to home) and ended because the audience diminished after the first episode.

In some ways it was ahead of its time.

Imagine if Majestic was done today. You could be contacted 24/7 with phones, apps within phones, Twitter, Facebook, AIM, YouTube, etc.

Alas this real life X-Files never caught on. And oddly enough I never got to finish the game I started. I actually got to about Episode 3 (out of 4). Hmm anybody know how it ended?

Well for now, my inner Mulder will have to wait until they come up with a reboot of this game or some sort of variation.

Check out these videos of what was.

First up, the marketing campaign circa Summer 2001.

EA Majestic from Mercury Multimedia on Vimeo.

The Majestic trailer



A preview of Majestic Episode 2.



Here's a making of video featurette.



Here is some LINKAGE:

• Wikipedia
  
• Wired.com Article

Categories: ARG, leftover thoughts, majestic, rewind, video game movies

Leftover Thoughts: Compare and Contrast Edition

Before I started the jaded viewer, I had a personal blog filled with my leftover thoughts. The blog was aptly titled leftoverthoughts. It was pure continuum of thought, just randomness, blurbs and mumbo jumbo.

Many of my friends also had blogs slightly inspired by my insane ranting and raving. Now that I have more than 3 people visiting this site, I figured I could sneak in a few old leftover thoughts posts that were snarky, funny and completely off the wall.

The post below was written by my friend (C.R.) for his now defunct blog Acoustic Shadows. Every time I read it, it makes me laugh. Read the post for a quick Friday LOL.

Enjoy!

compare and contrast
By CR (1/12/03)

The Atlantic Ocean, Eons Ago

The yellow ball stays longer each day, warming the water. The school knows this means it is time to travel to the coastline and mate. Already a few of the males have made their bellies red, signaling their eagerness. The fish are not good swimmers--all around them, sleeker, better adapted fish easily outdistance them. The school compensates by attaching themselves to rocks and seaweed with small, sucker-like discs on the bottom of their bodies--they can't move forward very quickly, but at least the current doesn't push them backwards. They do not have many predators--to be quite honest, they are ugly, even to each other, and their skin is tough and lumpy. As a result, few of the deep's lurking predators care to eat them, even though they swim slowly and weakly. The eggs, however, are another matter. Anything which is completely defenseless is a meal when it's sitting on the merciless ocean floor, ugly or not. And nothing is more defenseless than an unhatched egg. So when the school reaches the coastline, the females lay their eggs and, their task completed, weakly swim back out to sea. The males stay, keeping vigil over the eggs until they hatch, not eating, and not leaving the eggs except to face down predators. The fish do not take joy in this, any more than they do in eating--it is simply what they have always done, and will always do.

Mesopotamia, At The Same Time

The other monkeys are all sleeping or eating lice off each other, but Danger-Finder is bored. It's a new sensation--he has never been bored before. In that it is new, the novelty of it almost cancels the boredom itself, momentarily. But in the end, boredom wins. Danger-Finder wants to throw something at one of the other monkeys, but most of the males are bigger than him and mean too, and if he throws something at one of the females then she probably won't let him do the sweaty grunting thing later. So he sits, almost wishing there was some danger. When there is danger, Danger-Finder screams to tell the other monkeys about it, which is how he got his name, and then they all run through the trees. Then later when they're safe, he gets him berries to eat, and even Strong-Fierce, the biggest monkey, will let him eat and not take any of the berries. Danger-Finder starts to think about things other than eating and throwing and running and playing. Soon Danger-Finder begins to think about what he is doing--thinking. Danger-Finder wonders if Strong-Fierce can do it as well as he can. He bets not. He wonders if he can use thinking to stop Strong-Fierce from taking his berries, not just when there's danger, but every day. Civilization begins.

Cleveland, Ohio, Present Day

I had caviar on crackers for dinner today. It was delicious. I'm glad I have a thumb.

Categories: jadedviewer, jadedviewer.com, leftover thoughts, the jaded viewer

Leftover Thoughts: Jaded Viewer Edition

Before I started the jaded viewer, I had a personal blog filled with my leftover thoughts. The blog was aptly titled leftoverthoughts. It was pure continuum of thought, just randomness, blurbs and mumbo jumbo. I figured I'd share the more movie and horror themed thoughts I posted on this now defunct site. Enjoy!

• You know, its actually hard to speak like you're in the Buffyverse...I know this for a fact because I tend to skew my nouns into adjectives and verbs (and when you do this, you tend to create nouns that shouldn't be verbilized (see?))

• Thank you Wikipedia for having an article on "The Chroniton" and having a "Back to the Future" timeline

• When I was in college, I worked for a adult video store and sorta had the "8mm" type job. On a weird night where business was slow, 2 hot looking lesbians started to flirt with me and started to make out gratuitously right in front of my eyes, they started taking off their tight knit shirts...(or that could have been one of the many pornos I watched with my free rental employee perk)
  

• One day I'm going to pretend I'm a vampire and go to sleep during the day and stay awake all night, I'll even pretend to imagine sunlight hurts me and I'm allergic to garlic and silver...and on that day, I will get hit by a speeding drunk driver who thinks he's a vampire slayer
  
  
• Superman totally outsmarted General Zod in Superman 2. Fuck you Superman.
  
  
• The one thing about living in New York is that you get to see the most disfigured people in the world. Not just people who have multiple eyes or have no ears but people who suffer from a disfiguring disease like that bumps disease. I recently passed a woman on the street where her entire right side of her face just drooped. It was like 2 feet of droopiness. Even the homeless couldn't stop looking at her.
  
  
• Does anybody have a copy of the episode of Different Strokes when either the following happened?
  
  A.) Arnold gets molested/kidnapped
  B.) Kimberly gets molested/kidnapped
  C.) Sam gets molested/kidnapped
  D.) Willis smokes up joint
  E.) Arnold, Dudley, Kimberly, Willis and Sam get kidnapped, molested and smoke up a joint
  
  
• When is the appropriate time to just go on a killing spree?
  
  
• Remember when you discovered the Internet?
  The first time I used the Internet was to accomplish these 3 things.
  
  1.) Find Information
  Yup. Find information. What kind of info you ask? Who the fuck cares? I wanted to find out about anything. Cannibal movies, old 80's television shows, celebrity corpses, who invented toothpaste? Is my final exam tomorrow?
  
  2.) Porn
  "What the fuck is the Internet?" Of course. To share pornography with one another.
  Are you telling me I can see Jenny McCarthy naked...........for free? Yup. At one point in college I saw somebody put up crippled midget porn as wallpaper. No shame at all.
  
  3.) Mp3's
  Music, for free? God bless the Internet!! Thanks pre lawsuit Napster!
  
  
• Porn is really repetitive.

That is all for now. Now that I think of it, leftover thoughts have evolved into leftover tweets. So if you want to hear more random leftover thoughts, follow me on Twitter @jadedviewer!

Categories: jadedviewer, jadedviewer.com, leftover thoughts, the horror continuum, the jaded viewer