Basically what’s a game that you’ve played that seemed so mind blowingly unique at the time but for one reason or another the game never took off and other developers didn’t pick up and run with it either.
Basically what’s a game that you’ve played that seemed so mind blowingly unique at the time but for one reason or another the game never took off and other developers didn’t pick up and run with it either.
The game I’d kick this off with is an EA game called Majestic from 2001. I remember playing this when I first started college and the internet was young and it blew my mind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majestic_(video_game)
This game was like being wrapped up in a real life conspiracy. You would browse obscure web pages, get faxes (which believe it or not was still a thing back then, haha), get phone calls, early blackberry texts, emails, and even a very rudimentary ai chat system over AIM. All while trying to uncover an online conspiracy.
I remember being super excited for each new episode and was really bummed when it got discontinued a year later. I seem to remember the writing wasn’t all that great and the acting was old school FMV bad, but IMO that added to the charm.
I feel like this game concept was way ahead of its time. Can you imagine a similar thing using AI tech from 2023? That feels like it would have so much potential.
Interesting. I think The Black Watchmen has done something similar but I haven’t played it.
I used to play Black Watchmen and they did a lot of he same stuff described here. Depending on the city you lived in you could participate in real life events and they’d leave weird letters in your mailbox.
You just unlocked a seriously backlogged memory. I remember reading about this game/service in a GamePro magazine and it sounded fucking NUTS. I always wanted to play it but I was too young and we didn’t have the necessary stuff like a fax machine to get the most out of it.
It was pretty nuts. I didn’t have a blackberry so I couldn’t use the blackberry feature. And our printer worked as a fax machine but we didn’t have a dedicated phone line for it cause it was also the dial up modem line haha. So I got kind of a watered down version of the game because I couldn’t use all of the features.
I remember that game! I played it for a bit and remember that it ended up making me paranoid as heck! You could choose anywhere from light immersion where all the phone calls and such had a disclaimer at the beginning that it was part of the game, to full immersion where there was no warning and you were getting death threats out of nowhere late at night.
It was a really neat concept and I was sad when they shut it down.
LOL. My parents would have killed me if I had them get random death threats to the phone line without a disclaimer. I was still living at home the first couple years of college. The game was super immersive. I liked the story too. They made that whole fake game company that supposedly made the game and then had them collapse and be behind the conspiracy. Super cool. Back when EA stood for innovation instead of destroying smaller companies that it acquires.
I mean I can believe it considering I had to randomly fax something 21 years since then haha.