Bold claims, but this is more than just lip service. The album itself is a dark and noisy work and takes the listener on a journey through a corrupt future building toward mankind's destruction. The various websites are more than the kind of fluff pieces you find in your DVD special features menu; they contain personal stories told by the people living in Year Zero's world and expand the experience far beyond what fits on a 74-minute music CD.
What's more, the story is a call to action for the players. The sites and leaked tracks are material sent back in time by the resistance as a warning. The players found it inspirational. At concerts, fans wear homemade resistance-branded T-shirts, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. The player forums are filled with discussions of all sorts of fan made material inspired by Year Zero. The forums also contain many topics about how the ideas and themes from the album match real-world events.
One of the more interesting developments was opensourceresistance.net, a site where players were actively encouraged to submit their own content inspired by the story. Reznor has also been slowly releasing tracks from the album in GarageBand format to allow fans to take the songs apart piece by piece and create their own remixes. It's this kind of two-way collaboration between the artist and the audience that exposes ARGs' real boundary-breaking potential. In fact, one of the sites exposed after the album's launch listed the names of the game's active players as criminals, drawing the players even further into the game's universe.
The Year Zero ARG is still running today to promote Nine Inch Nails' latest remix album. The effect it has on the ARG movement can't yet be determined, but if the legions of homemade resistance T-shirt-clad industrial fans are any indication, the genre itself can go anywhere and be anything.
Richard Perrin lives in Sheffield, England, working as the designer and producer for independent game developer Studio Trophis. He also works as a freelance videogame journalist and maintains a blog about interactive storytelling called Locked Door Puzzle. He's partial to a quality vodka.
