An alternate reality game (ARG) is an interactive networked narrative that uses the real world as a platform and employs transmedia storytelling to deliver a story that may be altered by players' ideas or actions.
Seto Kaiba is a fictional character in the manga Yu-Gi-Oh! by Kazuki Takahashi. As the majority shareholder and CEO of his own multi-national gaming company, Kaiba Corporation, Kaiba holds the reputation of being Japan's greatest gamer and aims to become the world's greatest player of the American card game, Duel Monsters. In all mediums, his arch-rival is the protagonist of the series, Yugi Mutou, who is also a superb game player. He is the modern day reincarnation of one of the Pharaoh's Six High Priests, "Priest Seto", who appears in the manga final arc. Kaiba has also appeared in related anime works and feature films.
A Series of Unfortunate Events is a series of thirteen children's novels written by American author Daniel Handler under the pen name Lemony Snicket. The books follow the turbulent lives of Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire. After their parents' death in a fire, the children are placed in the custody of a murderous relative, Count Olaf, who attempts to steal their inheritance and, later, orchestrates numerous disasters with the help of his accomplices as the children attempt to flee. As the plot progresses, the Baudelaires gradually confront further mysteries surrounding their family and deep conspiracies involving a secret society known as V.F.D., with connections to Olaf, their parents, and many other relatives. The series is narrated by Lemony Snicket, who dedicates each of his works to his deceased love interest, Beatrice, and often attempts to dissuade the reader from reading the Baudelaires' story.
I Love Bees was an alternate reality game (ARG) that served as both a real-world experience and viral marketing campaign for the release of developer Bungie's 2004 video game Halo 2. The game was created and developed by 42 Entertainment. Many of the same personnel had previously created an ARG for the film A.I. titled The Beast. I Love Bees was commissioned by Microsoft, Halo 2's publisher and Bungie's ultimate parent company at the time.
Half-Life 2: Episode One is a 2006 first-person shooter game developed and published by Valve. Like previous Half-Life games, it combines shooting, puzzle-solving, and narrative. Players control scientist Gordon Freeman, who, alongside his companion Alyx Vance, must escape City 17 before an explosion destroys it.
Perplex City was a long-term alternate reality game (ARG) presented by Mind Candy, a London-based development team. The first "season" of the game had players looking for "The Receda Cube", a priceless scientific and spiritual artifact to the people of a fictional metropolis known as "Perplex City", that had been stolen and buried somewhere on Earth. The game offered a real-life £100,000 reward to whoever found it. Like most alternate reality games, the story of Perplex City is told through blogs, puzzles, and other various media.
Jamie Kane is an alternative reality game created by the BBC, aimed primarily at teens, aged 14 years to 18 years, appealing to both sexes due to its mix of mystery and drama. The game is named after the main character in it, a fictional pop star. In addition to a primary web site, the game is noted for involving interspersing fictional content related to the game in many of the BBC's web sites, including fictional interviews between BBC Radio 1 presenters and Jamie Kane, fake Top of the Pops appearances by the character, and fake BBC News reports of the character's death. The aim of the game was for players to unravel the mystery of that death, solving online puzzles and following clues that were available from a variety of sources.
MindTrap is a series of lateral thinking puzzle games played by two individuals or teams. Invented in Canada, it is the main product of MindTrap Games, Inc., who license the game for manufacture by various companies including Outset Media, Blue Opal, the Great American Puzzle Factory, Pressman Toy Corporation, Spears Games and Winning Moves.
Alternate reality games are a modern genre of gaming often consisting of an interactive, networked narrative that uses the real world as a platform and employs transmedia storytelling to deliver a story that may be altered by players' ideas or actions. Most of these games are either independently run or used as a viral marketing campaign by a company or brand.
Ethan Haas Was Right (EHWR) is a viral marketing campaign developed by Mind Storm Labs to promote its role-playing game Alpha Omega: The Beginning and The End. It involves an apocalypse taking place in the near future, and those who will band together to survive it and those who bring it down upon this world. The game received publicity online after it was erroneously connected with the J. J. Abrams film Cloverfield.
Penumbra: Black Plague is the second installment of the Penumbra series of episodic video games developed by Frictional Games. The story continues from the previous episode, Penumbra: Overture, showing the protagonist Philip moving away from the abandoned mine setting of the original to explore an underground research base. Black Plague was released in February 2008 to generally favourable reviews from critics. Although originally intended to conclude the series, a further expansion called Penumbra: Requiem was released later that year.
The Save to Ring was an alternate reality game (ARG) initiated by McDonald's, as part of their marketing for the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, China. A co-production between McDonald's, AKQA, and Jane McGonigal, the game was notable for its global scope: taking place across six continents, in seven languages, and running for six months. It began with six amnesiac athletes with strange tattoos, and culminated in the "revival" of a fictional Ancient Olympic sport – which the narrative described as having disappeared 2000 years ago before the events of the game.
Android is an adventure board game designed by Kevin Wilson and Dan Clark, published in 2008 by Fantasy Flight Games. Set in a dystopian future, where the Moon is colonized and androids and clones are real, players take on the roles of murder investigators, investigating a murder within the fictional cities of New Angeles and Heinlein, a colony on the Moon. Players attempt to gain Victory Points by solving the murder, solving the conspiracy, and/or resolving the investigators' personal issues. The player with the most Victory Points wins the game.
Deleted – The Game is an interactive web drama developed by indie producers GEN247 about a group of characters who unwittingly become entangled in an identity theft scheme to rig the US Elections 2008. The show's creators combined a 12 webisode drama series with a sprawling interactive social game that allowed the audience to help the show's characters solve problems and puzzles along the way communicating through popular social media like MySpace and Facebook and blogs. In the course of these interactions with the characters, the audience would affect the way events in the story unfolded.
Andrea Phillips is an American transmedia game designer and writer. She has been active in the genres of transmedia storytelling and alternate reality games (ARGs), in a variety of roles, since 2001. She has written for, designed, or substantially participated in the creation of Perplex City, the BAFTA-nominated Routes, and The 2012 Experience, a marketing campaign for the film 2012.
The Potato Sack is the name of an alternate reality game (ARG) created by Valve and the developers of thirteen independent video games to promote the release of Valve's game Portal 2, in April 2011. Valve president Gabe Newell envisioned the game as a "Cross Game Design Event" in December 2010, and allowed the developers a free rein to design the game using Valve's Portal intellectual property. The game, requiring players to find and solve a number of puzzles hidden within updates of the thirteen games, led to the opportunity for players to release Portal 2 about 10 hours earlier than its planned release by playing games under the pretense of powering up GLaDOS, the sentient computer antagonist from the Portal series. The ARG's theme of potatoes is based on plot elements within Portal 2, specifically that for part of the game, GLaDOS's personality module is run off a potato battery.
Technobabylon is a cyberpunk adventure game developed by Technocrat Games and published by Wadjet Eye Games for Microsoft Windows. Originally intended as a series of 10 free episodic games, of which three were released, it was released as a full game on 21 May 2015. The game's story covers 10 chapters, and focuses on three characters who live in the future city of Newton that is governed by an autonomous AI administrator, each of whom is faced with a complex matter, but soon find themselves caught up in a conspiracy surrounding the city's AI, including murder and hidden truths about its creation.
Frog Fractions 2 is a sequel to the free browser-based game Frog Fractions, which was developed by independent game studio Twinbeard, founded by Jim Stormdancer. Stormdancer used an extended alternate reality game (ARG) as part of the game's announcement and subsequent development, tying the release of the game to the success of the players' completing the ARG's puzzles. Frog Fractions 2 was revealed to have been released on December 26, 2016, after players completed the ARG, though its content was hidden within the game Glittermitten Grove, a secondary game developed by Craig Timpany, a friend of Stormdancer, and released without much attention a few weeks prior to the ARG's completion.
Sombra is a fictional character in the Overwatch universe, a 2016 video game developed by Blizzard Entertainment. In the game's narrative, she is an exceptional black bag operation hacker from Mexico that had joined Talon, a criminal organization aligned against Overwatch. In game, Sombra has stealth-based abilities to move around the battlefield, and is able to hack any opposing character to briefly prevent them from using their special abilities.
Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War is a 2020 first-person shooter video game developed by Treyarch and Raven Software and published by Activision. It was released worldwide on November 13, 2020, for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X and S. It serves as the sixth installment in the Black Ops series and the seventeenth installment in the overall Call of Duty series. The game is the second Call of Duty title since 2011's Modern Warfare 3 to be co-developed by two studios.
