Majestic: You Don't Just Play This Game, You Live It
Meet the new level of interactive realism in this online conspiracy thriller starring--you.
Forget Survivor and The Sopranos. Why just sit and watch a TV show when you can really live one? That's the pitch for Electronic Arts' groundbreaking PC-based adventure game, Majestic.
Due to launch by early summer, Majestic makes you the star of an online-only conspiracy thriller that unfolds around you--and not just while you're at the PC. When it's not putting videos or scanned copies of realistic-looking newspaper articles on your hard drive, the game will call you on your phone, send you faxes and e-mails, or chat with you via AOL Instant Messenger (using remarkably convincing artificial intelligence to interpret your comments and generate responses).
Majestic is designed to be played in small chunks of time, instead of in hours spent at your PC. It's up to you to advance the experience by solving puzzles using clues planted in all these media to find places (like Web sites) or do things (like chat with a character) that, in turn, trigger other events and advance the game.
Players must use the dmoz.org open-source search system, as it is integrated into the game's home page.
However, Majestic doesn't have to dominate you. When you sign up, you can set parameters for when you may be contacted. If you don't, the game is likely to call you in the middle of the night.
Majestic is not for kids. The game's rating is M (for mature)--and those players who give their age as under 18 when registering will be rejected. Nor is Majestic free after the pilot: You must subscribe to the EA Platinum Service at $10 a month.
To play, you download a small application and specify how and when you'd like to be contacted. After that, you wait to hear from the game, which unfolds in episodes much like a TV series. The pilot plays out over four to five days; then, new episodes launch over each of the next eight months.
You don't have to play every day, but if you were to, each episode would play out over roughly 15 days and require about 15 to 20 minutes of your time.
Majestic represents a new twist on the multiplayer online game craze that has prompted tens of thousands of players to pay about $10 a month to log on to Sony's EverQuest role-playing game.
Neil Young, vice president and executive in charge of production at EA, hopes Majestic will be to the Internet what Orson Welles's War of the Worlds broadcast was to radio in its day--a convincing fantasy that exploited its medium (or multimedia, in this case) to the fullest. "In some ways," Young says, "it's a reinvention of the category of the adventure game."
