In the same way that firstperson shooters thrive in a military setting, alternate reality games (ARGs) are an apt home for conspiracy theories and long-lost secrets. So it’s no surprise that Smoking Gun Interactive has rolled out its mysterious new property in an ARG, before it brings it to consoles. The start-up developer, founded by a break-off team from Relic and featuring some of the talents behind Company Of Heroes, has created an ambitious new world, and players have only just seen the beginning of it.

The story opens in a graphic novel, where an unusual artifact has triggered strange lights and flying saucers in the skies over Los Angeles. A shadowy enemy, a team of earnest researchers and a plot that ties together fan-favorite enigmas from across the eras: it’s fertile ground for a property that extends from a comic to the web, and someday, to game consoles.

John Johnson, Smoking Gun’s CEO and creative director, says that the idea has been brewing in his head since the mid-90s, gestating it over many beers with lead narrative designer Duane Pye. The premise centers on ancient mythologies, encrypted texts, and the hidden connections between them. “I’ve always been fascinated with these types of questions, and I know a lot of other people are also fascinated with how these different mythologies fit together.

“When we started the company we built a research team, and they were just pounding through and getting all the info together from all of these things that we think tie together, and actually string them into the narrative threads that we’re thinking about.”



The world they’re building lives in a 1,000 page internal wiki at the studio, which currently employs about 25. Acclaimed cyberpunk writer and media theorist Douglas Rushkoff penned the graphic novel, titled X, with art by Cheoljoo Lee and Younger Yang. The first 30 pages are online at www.exoriare.com, and the full book will see print in the near future. For now, the comic and the alternate reality game are the only view into the gameworld, which doesn’t even have an official name: players simply refer to it now as Exoriare, the name of the ARG’s website.

The first rabbit hole sits on page thirteen of the online graphic novel. Look closely at a computer screen in the corner of a panel, and you’ll see that it’s hyperlinked; click it, and you slip into a rich Flash application, which greets you with a piece of interactive fiction that pays homage to Zork. Once you find your way through it, you’re given the chance to enter the Darknet – the network established by those who are fighting whatever sinister conspiracy has emerged. As Johnson describes it, “[We’re] making them feel like they are becoming part of the resistance.”

The system assigns you a cryptic username and a chance to find your way, via puzzles and bits of hidden media, deeper into the Darknet. Black backgrounds marked with ghostly swirls – neurons? The Milky Way? Both? – are soundtracked with pinging ambient music, and DOS-like pop-up windows combine the thrill of hacking with the eeriness of a haunting.