Find Friends to Foil Fake Fforde: A “Thursday Next” ARG

Amy Greenford is a mild-mannered bookstore employee working in the Classic books section of Foyles on Charing Cross road, and the books in her store have been behaving oddly. Books get mysteriously misfiled in the wrong section, pages of text simply vanish. Oh, and a bride and groom have materialized from a book and fled the store. Literature is in danger, and only we can save it, with the help of Spec-Ops 27 and the literary detectives.

Most specifically, Jasper Fforde’s upcoming Thursday Next novel First Among Sequels, scheduled to be released on Thursday July 5th, is in danger. Slight errors and suspicious emails to fans of Jasper Fforde who entered an online quiz competition led them to June Haversham’s blog, a publicity and marketing employee for UK publisher Hodder & Stoughton. It appears an impostor is trying to supplant the real Jasper and release a different version of the book. Both plots appear to be converging with Jasper Fforde’s scheduled book signings at Swindon Waterstones on July 7th and Foyles on July 9th.

This alternate reality game appears to offer a “novel” exploration of the line between the real world and the fictional including a woman dressed as a bride singing opera in the streets of London and numerous dead-drops inside misfiled books at Foyles. If you have a deep and abiding love of the classics, this may be the game for you. It might also be worth checking out Jasper Fforde’s books, as they include many elements that would be appealing to avid alternate reality gamers.

Click Here for the trailhead.
Click Here for the UnFiction discussion.
Click Here to learn more about Jasper Fforde and the “Thursday Next” series.