everything about this pitch is like "game that would get someone killed within a month"
for details on majestic—a 2001 game by EA that "broke the fourth wall" in ways similar to (but more restrained than) this—and why it failed miserably please consult my post on the subject
a couple months ago, i gave a talk with katherine @morayati at narrascope 2022 about what we termed interface fiction: games that tell stories primarily through computer interfaces, simulated or non-simulated. during the talk, i mentioned that i've been obsessed for nearly two decades by majestic (2001), a good example of interface fiction and one of the earliest and most extensive big-budget ARGs.
if you're not familiar, majestic was a subscription-based game that would be "played" through phone calls, emails, instant messages, and faxes. at specific, scheduled intervals (that the player would define upon registering with the game), majestic characters would contact the player by phoning them, emailing them, etc., to deliver a story beat, a clue to a puzzle, or further information about what was happening. the idea was that the player, unexpectedly at the centre of a giant government conspiracy, would never be able to predict when, where, or how the next part of the game would present itself. if you were twelve years old like lil ol' me when this was announced, this was the coolest possible game that could have ever existed.
long story short, the game failed mostly because it was released two months before 9/11 (aka the most hilarious possible time to release a government conspiracy game where shadowy folks call you and email you and so forth). it lasted about nine months or so and is now completely unplayable. i won't go into further detail about its creation and demise because phil salvador (@shadsy) has already written a brilliant post about majestic on his blog the Obscuritory — i really recommend checking it out here.
instead, i want to show off that i recently bought a copy of majestic on ebay, like a true freak.
i think the reason i find majestic so compelling is that it's the inverse of most modern game preservation. emulation has (thankfully, rightfully) has made it easier than ever to preserve games across platforms & across decades, regardless of whether physical copies exist or not. but with majestic, i have a physical copy in my hands; the CD is in my CD-ROM; i've installed it on my fancy modern pc perfectly fine; the central messaging hub is literally running in the background as we speak, waiting for me to log in... and yet not only can the game never be played again, there's so little available about what the game consisted of, what its narrative was, or how it worked.
i've been trying to find as much as i possibly can about this game by trawling through the CD (which basically has a copy of aol instant messager, realplayer, and little else) and the strategy guide. the guide has been helpful because it points you in the direction of some websites that have been saved by the internet archive:
unfortunately, it looks like any other website that was listed in the strategy guide was walled behind cookies or some other authentication, so they weren't scraped by the archive. so beyond these websites, and the written walkthrough of episode one in the strategy guide... this is all i've got. there's a behind the scenes video on the CD (which looks to be the same as this EPK) and some cheesy electronic music, but little else.
if anyone has any other information about this game, how it was played, or what the story was all about... let me know. and if folks want me to transcribe the strategy guide... let me know that as well.
for the time being, i'll just leave majestic running in my taskbar, waiting for someone to phone.
