I was curious about what led to his decision to leave. "Well, you know, I started out in the paper games industry, and after 13 years of working with programmers, I think I needed a bit of a break," he said, laughing. "But I also think that, as cool as being on top of the food chain for Xbox and Microsoft Games was, from a Creative Director's standpoint, it also meant that I didn't get to work on my own projects. I was babysitting everyone else's. And, ultimately, that's what I left to do. So in that period of time, there were only two projects that were mine." Those two projects were Crimson Skies and The Beast. "The Beast I was sort of doing totally off in left field."
While The Beast was not the first alternate reality game, it is a major reason for the genre's popularity today. Not only was The Beast a highly successful game on its own, the many players it drew in - especially a dedicated group called the Cloudmakers - contributed to many new up-and-coming ARGs and continue to breathe life into the genre. Microsoft's contribution was, Weisman says, almost entirely accidental. "Microsoft had acquired a license to do games based on Spielberg's film Artificial Intelligence, which is a tall order, because it was not a movie that anybody was going to walk out of saying 'Gosh, now we get to play the game.'
"Whether you liked the movie or not, it's a very private, emotional story, not a classic game-setting type of story. But the universe in which the movie was set had some game potential. It was a dynamic universe with interesting technology and some interesting central conflicts, which could be used as an interesting backdrop for games. Microsoft had a need to be able to effectively bring the backdrop of the movie to the forefront and use it as a context to set our games against."
As Creative Director, Weisman says, "I was looking at ways to do that, and we used the platform to experiment with some of the storytelling techniques that I'd been wanting to do on the web. [I was] looking for a story format that's dynamic for the web. Because in my mind, every communications technology eventually develops a narrative format that takes advantage of that communications technology." He uses examples, like the novel existing because of the printing press, movies existing because of film, and so on. The web, however, "didn't have a storytelling format that was developed specifically for the web."
At the time, the web "was used to transmit previously created formats of linear and branching concepts. So I kind of stood back and said, 'Well, what do we do on the web every day?' I really looked through a ton of crap trying to relay information in a way people would care about," be it an article or photograph or whatever. He likens the way people look for information on the web to "an archaeologist looking through a lot of sand for a piece of pottery, for a shard of pottery. And if they find the shard, they find more shards of pottery, and if they find enough, they can not just reconstruct the pot, but the entire society that left that pot behind thousands of years ago. I thought that would be an interesting way to tell stories, what we call the deconstructed narrative.
"I thought about, given the communication technologies and tools at our disposal. ... Would there be a way to form what we called The Hive Mind, and focus [the players] on the telling of the story ... rather than us telling the story to them?"
As he began to explore that idea, "it turned out that Warner Brothers was also looking for a way to raise exposure for [A.I.]." This was largely because, he says, "[Spielberg] was not giving them any film to work with. He likes to keep the story really close to his chest and not have the entire story revealed in the trailers, which is something I [can] appreciate."
