I suddenly had a bit of nostalgia for this game/beautiful failed experiment called Majestic, which was released by EA on 2001. It was available online for a subscription of $9.95 a month and was sold at retail for $40. Majestic cited too small an audience and terminated the game and its components at the end of April in 2002.
The premise: You sign up online for a game dealing with conspiracies and shadow governments, but right after you finish setting up your tools for play something goes horribly wrong: The game studio burned to the ground and the servers are down leaving you with the promise of further information the next day. What do you find out the next day? The fire was no accident, and now the developers of the game are on the run. Why are they running? And from who(m)? The true game has now begun.
The technology: Majestic didn't run on an engine or have character models. The game ran mostly on technologies that many already possessed: web browser, phone, AOL instant messenger, fax, e-mail. The only addition was a small program you downloaded to manage and collect files (mostly video and audio recordings, but also pictures and notes). You progressed by solving puzzles hidden in webpages, e-mails, pictures, and other materials and the story was presented to the viewer through AIM chats and video messages from the characters.
The good: Majestic was as engrossing as the player wanted it to be. If the player didn't mess with the chat bots or scoff at some of the inconsistencies, the game worked well and immersed the player in a wealth of information that accompanied a decent story progression. Telephone calls could be spooky and it was difficult to discern which websites were real and which were built for the game. In fact, the makers of Majestic encouraged fans to build content and pass it around to increase the material for other players.
Majestic builds its plot from several conspiracy theories as well as many that were constructed purely for the game. It blurs the lines between reality and fiction using technology. For the player who wanted to be played by the game rather than play a game, it was an experience not to be missed.
The bad: Puzzles in Majestic ranged from super easy to super hard. All of the beginning episodes are filled with easy puzzles, poor chat bots, etc. and were sometimes slightly discouraging to the player who wished for more challenge. However, past the beginning of episode 2 of the 4, the puzzles became much more difficult and there were a small number of optional puzzles the developers introduced to keep the challenge up for the players who had already progressed through parts of the story and were waiting in limbo for the next event in their game.
And that's ultimately the big 'take it or leave it' elements of Majestic: The action throughout the game is on a time table. When someone says they will contact you the next day, they mean it. The game typically unfolds in real time. This means that the pilot can be finished in the matter of a couple of days, but the actual episodes are meant to unfold over the period of 2 to 4 weeks depending on how fast the player progresses through certain check points. This will definitely not satisfy gamers who are used to being under a barrage of imagery and stimulation for hours on end- those players will not stand the long periods of inactivity. This game was designed for the adult in mind, one that doesn't have much free time available to them and would like a periodic form of entertainment that they can build upon.
The ugly: Majestic was pulled about a year after it's release. Partly because they had to shut it down upon the September 11th attacks in 2001 and partly because they didn't keep an audience large enough to keep it going. Majestic is all but dead now and though the retail versions of the game can be found online for pretty cheap, the game itself can't be played anymore because the sites and servers associated are gone. If the game had been able to incorporate a fake browser with the websites and information, chat interaction, and maybe cellphone text messages or something, it could have kept going.
If you are interested in games like this, check out Missing: Since January and its sequel Evidence: The Last Ritual. Both games have you join an investigation and solve puzzles using web browsing, email, and the cd-rom to hunt down a killer and free his victims (you unlock videos and clues of his victims by solving his riddles and puzzles). And more importantly: both games will still work. They don't interact with your life in real time like Majestic does (no phone calls, IMs, faxes, etc), but you can still get a nice game/internet crossover akin to Majestic's.
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