G: Who else did you work with on this project? Was it purely a Double Twenty production?

M: Yes, it was purely a Double Twenty production, but like any ARG production there are vendors that contribute in magical ways. In this case, we enlisted the help of Vincent Marcone and his team over at My Pet Skeleton – to craft The Secret Device itself (yes, they also built the Oculus in OE). We also used a really great live action production company here in Los Angeles called Tight and through them found Danny Trachtenberg, who directed the live action elements of the ARG. We had some hiccups with a few of our external web development folks that caused some late hours, so if any of you out there know how to design and build state of the art websites and flash content… by all means, Contact D20 and send us your info!

G: Is there anything you learned after creating Ocular Effect that you applied to this project? Anything you specifically did the same?

M: Absolutely. Alternate reality is an ever shifting recipe mostly because the online landscape is constantly changing. Ocular Effect (OE) was very dynamic but also fairly complex – attracting a strong following of experienced players. I wanted this ARG to be accessible to a beginner audience – to spread to a larger player-verse and increase in mass. I wanted players that didn’t have any experience at all in the medium to experience those ‘ah hah’ moments because as a fellow gamer, I know that those moments build confidence and curiosity… they are the fuel that drives us to continue! Anyway, it was really important to me that I figure out a way to offer this ‘ah hah’ to new players – to get them hooked into TSD and ARGing in general. To accomplish this, we kept heavy reading/text to a minimum wherever we could, I created another ‘Oculus-like’ HUB and called it The Secret Device (part compass, part clue machine, part reward system) and probably most importantly, we tried to create a really fun and visual online world that players could get immersed in. The forums are completely user generated tribute to how it all came together :)

G: What were your goals for this project when you first began? Did those goals evolve at all during the course of the campaign?

M: Our goal was pretty simple from the start, create a quality online experience that extended the boundaries of the upcoming Hellboy II film and got people excited about the universe. Flexibility is the name of the game with projects like this one but I’ve got to say, our goals never shifted… just our execution at times.

G: It’s rare that any alternate reality game experiences no bumps in the road, no mistakes or unforeseen problems. Are there any that stand out in your mind that tested your flexibility?

M: Creating an ARG is all about unforeseen challenges; to me, it’s part of the medium itself. I’ve found that the great PM’s and experience architects can react by seamlessly integrating these potential issues into the experience. With so many genius players out there, plus the brute-force power of the community, ANYTHING is possible and those behind the curtain have to be flexible and prepared enough to deal with just about anything. It’s a really fine line – thankfully so far, we’ve avoided any significant issues.

G: Even, say, the mysterious 866-MANNING phone number? Can you describe what happened with that?

M: Right! That was a SNAFU for the ages! First off, it wasn’t ‘866-MANNING’, it was ‘Manning866’ – as in ‘Manning Tom’. It was a pretty innocent mishap that caused a lot of chaos within the community. Simply put, we wanted to give Tom Manning a Twitter handle and ‘Manning’ by itself was taken. So we got fancy and created ‘Manning866‘, but failed to calculate that it was exactly the length of a phone number… d’oh! Our initial plan was to spark up a brief conversation between QuestShaun and Manning866 so that we could nudge the community to solve the Blackwood image clue that they were struggling with for a while. So, in our haste to deliver a material clue to the community, we overlooked the character count and didn’t realize MANNING was 7 characters long. Add a 3 digit prefix for ‘TOM’, which in phone-code equals ‘866’, and POW! Instant unforeseen herring :) About 3 minutes after we let that clue out, we realized what we had done, but by then it was too late. The community had taken our clue and logically turned it into a phone number. Compounding the issue was the strange answering service on the other end which we had nothing to do with. It was pretty stressful, but also super funny at the same time– one of those really weird happenings that can only take place in an ARG. No one was hurt and everything ironed out in the wash. Remember what I said about flexibility and strength above?

G: What about things you wanted to incorporate, but didn’t have the time or money, or decided against after the project began?

M: How much extra time/money are we talking about here ;) Hah! Seriously, it might have been cool to have several live events woven in to the story. I probably would have focused them into major city hubs in North America and abroad because we managed to reach a really passionate international audience as well. I probably would have invested in additional PR as well, as getting the word out en mass never hurts (quick shout to my friends at Trust Collective!)

Pages: < Prev page [ 1 2 3 4 5 ] Next page >

Tags: d20, hellboy

Categories: ARGs General, Puppetmasters