At the beginning, in 1997 I discovered “The Game”, a movie with Michael Douglas; then “Majestic” came out.

Majestic: “It plays you”

I never played this game, but its story seemed really interesting; five episodes, one season and other seasons planned, but never released.

This was one of the first “Alternate reality game“.
Made by Electronic Arts in 2000, for a montly cost of $9.95 the players would have been involved in a conspiracy-like game; phone, email, instant messaging tools would have been used intensively to interact with the players.

In order to discover the story and to play the game, you had to communicate to Electronic Arts your phone number, your fax number and, as usual, your personal email.
The game was in real time, so in every moment of your day you could receive datas like emails, sms or phone calls to discover another piece of the story or some interesting clues.

You could enable an option during the game in order to give a warning in every message to do not scare your family.

“This is a phone call from the video game Majestic“, a female voice said.

…but September 11, 2001 came and the game stopped working for a while, due its subject matters, as you can read on Wikipedia’s article.

The game “died” in April 30, 2002 due to the lack of players.

A really interesting game experiment…that other games in the future would have used (eg: In Memoriam).

Trailer 1 on Gamespot
Trailer 2 on Gamespot

Intelligence cheers,
Marco