From: THE COMMERCIAL VIABILITY OF ALTERNATE REALITY GAMES:
A PROPOSED FRAMEWORK FOR PROFITABILITY AND SCALABILITY
LINK: https://s3.ca-central-1.amazonaws.com/pstorage-ryerson-5010877717/28138491/Robertson_LeeStahr_G.pdf
However, preceding Publius Enigma was what expert Szulborski (2005) suggests was truly the first ARG experience, Ong’s Hat / Incunabula. The Ong’s
Hat experience differed in that it intertwined two different narrative from both Ong’s Hat Ashram
in the 1970’s as well as that of “Incunabla Papers” (Szulborski, 2005a). Moreover, this experience
is only said to have precluded the modern ARG because it began so many years prior to the
introduction of technologies that now characterize the genre. The experience was so large and
spanned over so many years, that experts are unable to agree on when it actually began.
Furthermore, this experience was so ahead of its time that it has been dubbed as a
“literary/digital crossover” (Szulborski, 2005a) that incorporated mediums such as the CD-Rom,
traditional print, bulletin boards and eventually, the internet(Szulborski, 2005a). In fact, a
co-creator of the experience’s CD-Rom has suggested that Ong’s Hat included 23 complex puzzles,
some of which have yet to be solved or even identified (Szulborski,
2005a).
Consequently, many lessons were learned in this generation of ARGs that aided insofar as
identifying feasible experiential scope, depth of cross-media convergence and appropriate timelines
for the current generation. Additionally, because this
generation of ARGs would effectively draw to a close in the early to mid 1990’s, a majority of the technologies that characterize the current generation of ARGs were
beginning to emerge and shape the next generation.
Joseph Matheny 