Future Now
The IFTF Blog
History of pervasive games #1: Majestic
The term pervasive gaming will always first conjure up images of one game: Majestic. I never actually played this, being out of the country for most of its short little life, but I very much wish I had...
The concept behind Majestic was actually quite simple: you give the game multiple ways to contact you, including your phone number, email address, instant messenger accounts, fax number, and then your real life truly bleeds into your role in the game's conspiracy-theory plot. The game was divided into episodes, each playing out over 15-20 days. Players could control the level of intrusion the game was allowed into their real lives. Least intrusive saw players receiving all clues through the game's web site, while people opting for full immersion could expect to get phone calls from characters in the story in the middle of the night. What could be more pervasive than that? The team behind Majestic also set up hundreds of seemingly real web sites, accessible through real URLs, that players would have to visit and sometimes scour to find clues to the next part of the current puzzle.
A screenshot of an IM conversation in the Majestic game
The free pilot of Majestic had more than 100,000 people sign up in July 2001, but there was a sharp drop-off in participation once the $9.99 monthly fee kicked in and the game developers pulled the plug by April 2002 (after apparently spending millions of dollars on setting up the infrastructure and creating all of the content required for multiple media). As part of our research into pervasive gaming I'm hoping to talk to people that brought Majestic to life and find out more about how the game worked and theories on why it died prematurely. The cost many have been too high, particularly if the game didn't deliver new content regularly enough, or odd as it may seem for a game about alien conspiracies, the subject matter may not have been fantastical enough. The most popular online games--or MMOGs--are fantasies, such as Dungeons & Dragons-style. When playing games that involve living parallel lives, gamers may want these alternate worlds to be radically different than anything they can experience in real life. A game that plays out through faxes and surfing the web wouldn't seem to qualify. I'll post again as I find out more.