Yes, props to Twin Peaks.

Grrr, "wtf" @ where my long reply to this went? Dang, guess I have to retype it...... (damn, i really don't want to retype it....)

Anyway, in short (dang it), this reminds me of last summer's brilliant promotion for the movie "AI". It was a first-of-its-kind, interactive, real time, massively multiplayer web game. It didn't have any widely publicized begining (like this 3/8/03 crap) but began as an intended graphical anomoly in the AI poster which, when decoded, represented a phone number which, when called, put people at the begining of the game.

You can read all about it at cloudmakers.org , read the actual story detailing the game's progress at The Guide , and read about ALL the clues, puzzles, and hints in the game at The Trail .

It was really one hell of an experience to read about, chat with, and watch as 5000 people joined together to solve the puzzles thrown at them by the game's developers. (Ok, so probably a few hundred really did all the work). The "interactive" part of it all was that the game was being developed AS it was being played; reacting to how it was played. The game played out on a real-life timeline and had to be updated bi-weekly by the designers who, as I understand, were pressed pretty hard to be able to stump for days the hundreds of sharp, overly bored minds playing the game.

Interestingly, in starting to re-read the Guide (since I never finished it while I was following the game's actual progress), I noticed that the main character, "Evan Chan," died on March 8th 2142 (yeah, the game was set in the future, and the cool thing was, it progressed in real time with real updates from "the future").

3/8/2002 and 3/8/2142? Any Cloudmakers in the empeg world (aka: members of the cult that formed around this game) wanna take a crack at this?!