Metacortechs

Description
With an eight week live run, Project Mu was relatively short for a large promotional alternate reality game. The fan fiction effort brought the world of the Matrix Trilogy to the internet, email, phone, and chat. When it was all said and done, over 125,000 players from 115 countries participated in the experience.
In Detail
Working with a small and very close team of designers, personal responsibilities were often blurred in the spirit of collaboration. Despite this, I was chiefly responsible for four different websites and, having written the initial plot with Sean Stacey, responsible for several of the major subplots. As such, my activity included web design, content and character writing and design, puzzle design and development, and coordinating the integration of the various plot lines. Working with the team, I participated in researching the Matrix trilogy as well as ways in which to take advantage of and build upon the highly symbolic Matrix narrative.

Communication is vital in any project and even moreso when the team is completely virtual and, in many cases, virtual strangers. With the members spread from the UK to Oregon, insuring that the team was working with current assets required vigilant care to various groupware systems (both commercial applications and homegrown) and much of my time was spent in maintaining and encouraging use of the system that we had put together.

We were all very pleased with our success, especially considering the short development and runtime of the project. Having some confidence that a similar promotion wasn’t underway, we began to research the possibility of doing a fan fiction effort with only four months until the premier of the third movie. That provided us with very little time to write a plot, design and develop the sites, and create the gaming experience.

Due to the time constraints and the impending holiday season, we decided early in the development cycle to restrict the game play to eight weeks starting on October 1. That would provide us with six solid weeks for development as well as six weeks running time before the premier of the movie, which we determined to be enough time to develop the story and, if needed, time to readjust the plot conclusion based upon the movie revelations.

It was also decided that, while the story would occur in the fictional world of the Matrix, the story would be able to stand on its own with references to the movies reserved as Easter Eggs and used as minimally as possible. Not only would this help us avoid intellectual property issues, it would allow us greater flexibility and security depending on the conclusion of the trilogy.

Once the plot was worked out and the sites were under development, we began to focus on the launch.
Understanding the joy of discovery and wanting to do as little active promotional work as possible so as to reserve that energy for development, we decided to run a text ad on Google to see what would happen. Within minutes the launch site was found and posted to a message board. We removed the advertisement and decided to let momentum build. We still had over a month to go before our October target date. To maintain the growing excitement, we created little pop-up teaser that provided hints as to what would come in a very “in-game” manner.

The end of September was a blur of excitement as we watched the number of message boards linking to the website grow while we were frantically attempting to pull everything together. By the time October hit, we were receiving thousands of hits a day and there was nothing more than a countdown timer. This helped us to get a sense of the traffic so that we could plan our hosting accordingly.

By mid-October, players and designers were settled into the routine of the game. Having decided early on to stick to a regular bi-weekly update schedule (so as to provide downtime to encourage speculation and community building as well as time for us to focus on content development), the players were able to anticipate when to come together and work through puzzles and information together. This led to a highly collaborative experience which we were able to use to our advantage in puzzle and game design.
The remainder of the eight weeks flew by and, by the end of the game, we had gathered over 125,000 players from all over the world making it one of the most popular Alternate Reality Games to date.