unforum

[carlitoxxi]

SPOILER!!!

[boboy]

who is katherine cunningham???

[oli]

The photos certainly look like the same woman.

I would also spec that the missing guy at heismissing.info is the ex-CEO of Metacortechs, James Avery.

[boboy]

flash intro codes

[Digital Avatar]

BTW: Underscore hosting is part of the ARG.

[Nyght_Shyft]

How did you get that info?

[Digital Avatar]

Nyght: I ran common dig, whois and traceroute searches.

In a UNIX shell the commands are, respectively:

[Mattix]

Just thought id bring this to the top, to see where it all started :'(

[Omnie]

You know, I hadn't entirely realized how unusual the beginning of this ARG was....

[vpisteve]

Since this wasn't really ever addressed in the chat or FAQ, I'll take a stab.

The first ARG, The Beast, began with clues being planted in the A.I. movie promotional material. Namely, notches in numbers at the end of the trailer that translated into a phone number (if memory serves), and Jeanine Salla's name in the credits. That's it. Someone googled Jeanine Salla (listed as Sentient Machine Therapist) and the rest was history.

Our goal with the Project MU launch was for it to be a total stealth launch, so as to recreate some of 'fun of discovery' that was so cool with The Beast: stumbling into the rabbit hole, so to speak, which leads suddenly into all these interrelated sites, and wondering what the heck this is.

Even though Unforums would have been a natural place to 'leak' info, we didn't want to shill our own game, and worked very hard to keep the curtain tightly shut. If unfiction found out about it at all, we wanted it to be from outside sources. So, we aimed at matrix fans, in hopes that word would spread, which it eventually did. Interestingly, Unfiction and Cloudmakers were way behind the curve at the beginning of this one, but they caught up quickly, heh.

We tried various techniques to get someone to notice the MetaCortechs placeholder with the countdown, but the one that worked was placing a Google ad that showed up on various matrix related keywords. Statik was the first to clickthrough, notice and post what he found. Then, in the week leading up to Oct. 1, we sent out the MetaVRX press release to various Matrix, media and gaming sites. It was bogus enough to let folks know that it couldn't be real, so that helped create quite a bit of interest.

While we really were aiming to create as much mystery as we could, we were also careful to include the truth of the matter in the various legal disclaimers on MC and USH, in addition to the press release. These disclaimers never seemed to get much attention, but they did basically say that no, this isn't real, and no, we're not the WB. There was also a privacy policy pertaining to contact info that nobody seemed to have noticed, either.

We were all very very pleased with how the game launched, as it seemed that we met, even surpassed all of our goals. It was really fun watching it all unfold.

[edited to add a smiley ]

[AnthraX101]

I noticed the privacy info. I actualy pointed many people too it when they were all PMing me with various legal-esque threats about themselfs giving up their contact info because they thought that it was WB.

AnthraX101