In my last post I promised threatened to share about the Cloverfield Alternate Reality Game (ARG).
If you have gotten this far, please humor me. Please check out the original website that launched the ARG over 10 years ago. (This is actually a mirror of the original site as that domain has been taken over by scoundrels.)
It may just look like a pile of pictures, but you can manipulate them. Mess around with the pictures a little bit. If you grab them and shake your mouse, some will flip over to reveal messages.
Ten years ago, there was one added feature, if you played with the pictures for around 30 seconds, the site would play the monster roar you hear in the trailers.
If you can't get that website to open or you don't have the proper pulgins, here are some youtube videos from when the game originally launched 10 years ago. The site was routinely updated leading up to the movie so neither of these are complete but they will give you an idea of what the experience was like.
Here's one with the roar.
If you looked at that site and thought "This is dumb. What a waste of time." I can't blame you. You clearly have a much fuller life than the one I had ten years ago. However, when I first saw it, my initial reaction was, "Holy shit! What is this? Who is Teddy Hansen? What is that thing on the beach? What are those planes attacking? What happened to that oil rig and why is one part pixelated? Why is...?"
You get the idea. I was immediately hooked.
If you are too and don't want me to spoil the game, please check out this site. It's not the same as playing the game 10 years ago, but you do get to hunt around a little bit.
If you are mildly interested but don't want to do any hunting on your own, I will give a little bit more information about the game below.
Still here huh?
After discovering that the pictures could be flipped, I typed "Lascano, Platt and Robbie" into Google. Google roared like the monster in the trailer. I do not mean this figuratively. I mean my computer actually played the roar. Sadly, this no longer happens (I tried).
In addition to hearing the roar, I discovered that these characters, as well as several others, had live Myspace pages (it was 2008 remember). By clicking on these pages, I could read about the lives of these characters. The pages also revealed other clues that lead me to more very fruitful google searches.
Instead of sleeping after seeing the movie, I chased lead after lead. Each clue opened up another mystery. It was awesome! After ten hours of searching (and my wife making fun of me for being such a geek) I honestly can't tell you the order in which I discovered the other pieces of the puzzle. The process reminded me of the "choose your own adventure books" I loved as a kid.
Here they are in what I believe is the intended order.
The 1-18-08.com website was the firs piece of the puzzle. (You saw that above). There were many different paths to take after studying those pictures.
If you had good eyes and remembered the trailer, you may have noticed Rob's brother is wearing a Slusho! shirt. Searching "Slusho" revealed a fully operational company website filled with content about the drink, it's history, the company and it's founder and most importantly: Tagruato, the parent company of Slusho!. You also learn that the secret ingredient of the drink is called “seabed nectar”. I believe this nectar is the food of the monster in the movies… and he is pissed that someone has been stealing it.
By the way, Slusho! is the company that Rob is going to work for in Japan (he revealed this on his Myspace page).
Although the Slusho! site is now dead, there are some screenshots from it.
The slogan "You can't drink just six." happens to be an anagram of "a toxic industry's junk".
If you noticed the mention of the http://tagruato.jp website or searched "Tagruato", you could access another another fully operational (and fictional) company website that is still functioning today. In fact, this is where the first clues about The Cloverfield Paradox were found.
This site contained the most information about Cloverfield. In addition to documents about it's founder, the site would be "hacked" from time to time and reveal messages from a whistle-blower inside the company. It also provided access to the following news footage:
Reading through the documents on the Tagruato site revealed the identity of a terrorist/environmentalist organization known as T.I.D.O. Wave. Of course this group also had a website. Although the site is no longer active, you can find most of the information from it here.
If you did not notice the Slusho! connection, there was another entrance to the maze: the Myspace pages. References to Slusho! and Tagruato could also be found in there. For even more fun you could discover the existence of two of the viral characters' private website jamieandteddy.com. But not so fast. In order to open the contents of that site, you needed a password. More searching revealed it was "jllovesth". If you typed this in, you got access to the videos Jamie made for her boyfriend who happened to be a member of T.I.D.O. Wave.
Here are all of the videos spliced together.
Jamie also happens to be at Rob's party.... although I doubt she remembers it.
It just kept getting deeper and deeper. For me, as the depth increased, so did my joy. I LOVED searching and finding new clues.
As I dug deeper, I discovered that it was possible that Tagruato had somehow discovered the monster we see in the Cloverfield movies. Perhaps it was sleeping in the ocean and was awoken by the deep sea drilling. Perhaps it fell from space looking for something. It is likely that the “seabed nectar” used to create Slusho! is important to the monster. It could be the creature’s food or a secretion from the monster itself. I’m still not sure (another reason I love the mystery!).
The only thing I am sure about is the fact that Tagruato and it’s subsidiary Slusho! are up to something. There was a whistleblower inside the company leaking information about the company’s nefarious activities. An organization named T.I.D.O. Wave is trying to stop them.
Oh and Howard Stambler from 10 Cloverfield Lane just so happened to be employee of the month for Tagruato.
And... Tagruato built the space station in The Cloverfield Paradox.
Before you go, check out the last name of the paranoid author who warned of the The Cloverfield Paradox.
The woman interviewing him happens to be her:
Despite all of its faults, The Cloverfield Paradox has reignited my excitement about the Cloverfield universe and has set up an infinite number of possibilities for prequels and sequels... and internet mystery games.
Thanks for indulging me.
Images
1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13
For more information check out these sites:
http://cloverfield.wikia.com/wiki/Cloverfield_Alternate_Reality_game
