Original Owner, Godfather of ARG
Steve was the creator and original owner of argn.com. After three years of authoring articles, Steve moved on to bigger and better things at No Mimes Media. During his time here, Steve was also one of the puppetmasters for the popular ARG Project MU. He is affectionately known as the Godfather of ARG.
Deaddrop today has announced its Best Alternate Reality Game Puzzle contest. The best puzzle will be used in an upcoming ARG, and the winner will also be invited to participate behind the scenes in that ARG.
Deaddrop will accept submissions for this puzzle contest through the end of January. The winner will be announced on Deaddrop, but you won’t see the puzzle until it shows up in a game.
For rules and submission procedures, refer to the post on the Deaddrop site.
There will be a post-game chat with the puppetmasters behind the recently concluded Sharp promotional game, dubbed “Legend of the Sacred Urns.” It will be tonight at 9:00 pm EST in #steinitz on chat-solutions. For those of you without a chat client, you can access the channel here.
If you followed along, now’s your chance to talk directly to those who were behind this well-done ARG promotion.
We’ve finished our upgrade to the ARGN Announce List backend, so you’re once again free to subscribe.
This is a very low-traffic email list, reserved for notifications of new games and major announcements only. If you want to be sure not to miss getting in on the ground floor of the next big ARG, this is your best bet.
If you’ve subscribed previously, there’s no need to re-subscribe.
The highly anticipated game The Matrix Online is scheduled to be released this spring. Beta testers of the game noticed a billboard advertising a sleep-aid product called Slumberil, and subsequently discovered slumberil.com.
Call us jaded, but we’ve gotten our hopes up before, hoping that a game-related site is an ARG trailhead, but then being disappointed to find out that it’s merely an atmospheric site, nothing more (as in recent game-related sites for the Myst and Grand Theft Auto series’). Nevertheless, a little digging reveals a juicy login page, a mailing list signup, and mysterious emails from someone named pandora.
The fact that there’s a spring release of Matrix Online increases the likelihood that this will turn into ARG goodness, but we’ll have to wait and see for now.
Discussion at Unfiction.
Chat in #slumberil
An alert member of Unfiction has stumbled upon The Evergreen Foundation, an organization that is “united and driven, not just by civic responsibility, but also by a moral imperative to contribute to the peaceful continuance of a society that is free from fear,” by developing technologies to increase the effectiveness of information gathering and surveillance.
Sound a little nefarious? Well, it should. Seems that if you dig a little into the site’s extranet, you’ll discover that something has escaped from their Genetic Health Care Center in Palmdale, and it looks like it’s killing local animals. A little further digging around reveals immediate links to other websites, including Resurrection Auto Parts (Serving Travellers Everywhere), Hollis Martial Arts, and the personal webpage of an industrial designer and motivational speaker named Judith Strand. On her site, she mentions having made the recent aquaintance of a “man who travels great distances to find a larger truth.”
All of this seems to be related to an upcoming novel, “The Traveler” by John Twelve Hawks. Whether this turns out to be a little backstory to the novel or an actual Alternate Reality Game remains to be seen, but geez. An evil genetic research company, an escaped test subject, a world spanning multiple websites……it’s got all the classic pieces (although the direct links at the bottom of the Random House page are a little non-subtle). Let’s just watch and see how they are played.
Discussion at Unfiction
If you’ve been driving around Melbourne Australia lately, you may have noticed billboards telling you to “get out of your mind,” and pointing to Neurocam.com. Apparently, those who sign up on the website have been given missions of varying degrees of complexity to complete, such as delivering a locked briefcase to a complete stranger. Failure to complete their mission will ostensibly result in serious consequences. Nobody seems to know who’s behind it, or what it’s promoting, if anything. Metafilter denizens are already comparing it with Fight Club, The Game, Mayday Mystery and The Beast.
A little poking around the Neurocam website reveals very little, but that in and of itself seems a little ARGish to us. Checking the site registration reveals that neurocam.com is the only site hosted on its server, and is registered to what appears to be a bogus address in Beverly Hills. In addition, an unprotected directory on the site reveals some rather interesting images. [EDIT: Seems someone’s been watching us. The images in question were removed soon after this article was published. You can now find them here.]
So, is it an ARG? Marketing tool? Cult recruitment technique? Drug running front? Hoax? We’ll keep an eye on this, but for now will file it under Undetermined.
Discussion at Unfiction
© 2026 ARGNet: Alternate Reality Gaming Network
Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑
masquerade nyc
giggleland
welcome home
meow wolf
escape rooms
curators request