The game with no aim

As the latest interactive puzzle hits the streets and the web, Paul Carr meets the man behind Perplex City - a cult in the making

So this is what an undisclosed location looks like. It is a balmy March evening and I am standing on the 5th floor of an anonymous office building in south London. I am here to meet the man - if indeed he is a man - behind Perplex City, the puzzle game that is gearing up to become the interactive phenomenon of the year. Secrecy is everything at Perplex City. Secrecy and flat-screen monitors, scores of which are crammed into the small room that acts as the top secret headquarters for the game's controllers.

The first anyone knew about Perplex City was when cryptic adverts were placed in newspapers around the world (including the Times and the Guardian) asking for help in finding a mysterious missing object known as "the Cube". No contact information was given - just a link to a site called Meanwhile around the world, hundreds of postcards simultaneously appeared in clubs, bars, shops and other public places, all containing subtle clues that led to the same website.

To someone who casually stumbles upon it, this all seems pretty meaningless. But for anyone familiar with the world of 21st century puzzles, the cards, the cryptic adverts, the site - they only mean one thing. The start of a brand new "alternate reality game".

But first some background. When history looks back and considers the phenomenon of early-21st century film hype, two letters will stand out like towering, disappointing giants. The letters are "AI". Make no mistake, Steven Spielberg's 2001 robo-flick, Artificial Intelligence: AI, was by far the most grotesque example of over-hyping and under-delivering ever to be discharged from the Hollywood creative sewer. But to be fair to Spielberg, it is hard to imagine how any film could possibly live up to the very special kind of hype that preceded its release. While most films make do with a poster campaign and a tightly-edited, deep-voiced trailer, the AI team asked Microsoft to create a truly ground-breaking type of interactive advertisement. Codenamed The Beast, it was not so much a game as a totally immersive on-and-offline adventure that grabbed players by the throat and threw them in to a fantasy world of murder, intrigue and seemingly unsolvable puzzles.

What those bemused players in 2001 did not realise, as they trawled for clues on the web and waited for late-night phone calls from fictional characters, was that they were witnessing the birth of the alternate reality game, or ARG - defined on a leading fan site as "an obsession-inspiring genre that blends real-life treasure hunting, interactive storytelling, video games and online community." The success of the Beast led to an avalanche of similar ARGs, to promote everything from "urban" T-shirt brands to pulp spy novels. But the level of round-the-clock commitment required by players meant that most of the copycats vanished without trace, with only a handful - like Electronic Arts' Majestic and Nokia's Nokia Game - registering as more than a passing blip on the cultural trend radar.

For a couple of years it looked as if ARGs were destined to join and Barcode Battlers in the e-dustbin of nice ideas that never really caught on. But then two things happened. First came the broadband explosion, creating a vast army of people who spend hours online every day looking for something to do. And then, not long afterwards, Dan Brown's book The Da Vinci Code shot to the top of the bestseller charts, introducing those very same people to the world of extreme puzzle solving. High-speed internet access, a horde of puzzle freaks - it was only a matter of time before ARGs were back with a vengeance.

The first signs of the ARG revival came when Microsoft launched an ingenious game called I Love Bees, to promote Halo 2 on the Xbox. Like AI, the game began with a weblink hidden in an advertisement. Initially the link appeared to lead to the blog of an amateur beekeeper, but before long the site was "hacked" and replaced with chapters of a story. Of course, this being an ARG, the chapters were, in fact, ingenious clues which led players to real-life payphones scattered across the world. Anyone who went to one of the phones at a pre-arranged time, answered it and gave the correct password, would unlock a new chapter and a new set of clues. The game was a huge online hit, winning its creators a prestigious Game Developers Choice Award and spawning a whole new base of fans who flocked to ARG fan sites like to eagerly await the next game to arrive on the scene.

Which brings us to Perplex City, and me to south London, for a meeting with the as-yet-unidentified mastermind of this year's most talked about ARG. For the purposes of this story, I will call him Michael Smith. He may share a name, and a face, with the 30-year-old founder of gadget e-tailer, but that is where the similarities end. Because in Perplex City, Michael is the puppetmaster - the leader of a team of full-time puzzle-makers whose job is to ensure that the clues that make up Perplex City are so mind-bendingly difficult that even the collective brains of thousands of players will struggle to solve them.

The team's most recent wheeze was to lead players to the famous zebra crossing at Abbey Road where, at a precise time, a character would hand over envelopes containing clues to the next phase of the game. But only if the players worked out the secret password in time. "About 20 people turned up and hundreds more watched via the Abbey Road webcam," says a clearly delighted Smith. "It's amazing". Indeed it is. But what is even more amazing is that none of the players had any idea why they were there or what they were playing for. There are persistent rumours of a big cash prize for whoever locates the mysterious "cube", but Smith remains tight- lipped about the exact aim of the game. Not that the players seem to care - for dedicated ARGers it is the taking part that counts. Smith does, however, hint that the current phase of the game is only the beginning - a trailer, if you will, for something even bigger and even more exciting. But what? "You'll have to play the game to find out." Of course. Sorry I asked. But whatever the next phase of the game turns out to be, it is certainly going to be vast - the walls of the Perplex City office are plastered with artist's impression of game characters, only a fraction of whom have so far been revealed to players.

"Who's the one who looks like Harold Shipman?" I ask, pointing to a sinister-looking chap with a beard - but Smith ignores me, with a smile. Suddenly I am paranoid. What if they are not characters at all - what if they are just red herrings to put me off the scent? If I come back tomorrow will this office even still be here? Who is Agent Smith working for? Is he the Matrix? And that is when I understand the brilliance of ARGs - like no other type of entertainment they create a constant sense amongst players that literally anything is possible. Smith says: "I'm absolutely convinced that ARGs are going to be a major new area of the entertainment industry - affecting film, TV, print publishing and video games. Big companies in Hollywood and the video game industry are starting to wake up to their potential. It's still very early days but I think the growth of ARGs over the next few months and years will be explosive."

But for now world domination will have to wait - the puppetmaster has more immediate concerns. While we have been talking, players have discovered the next phase of the game - an online newspaper called the Perplex City Sentinel ( Already the fan forums are abuzz with theories on what lies behind the mysterious subscription-only wall and what it all means for the search for the cube.

One player even suggests that the Guardian might be involved in some way - after all is not Sentinel another word for Guardian? By God, he is right. I scribble down the URL on the back of Harold Shipman, slip him into my back pocket and make my excuses. I have to get a computer. The clock is ticking - and the cube is not going to find itself.