Because of the allusion to artificial intelligence, Fabulich, then a 21-year-old Yale senior, knew immediately that this wasn’t a stalker-but a clue. The robot’s message was just the latest element in a fantasy world that has been created to promote the coming summer movie “A.I.,” an intricate maze of more than 30 Web sites. Although Fabulich had left his phone number on one of the sites, even he was surprised when the furious-sounding robot called his dorm room.
The Yalie became so addicted to the “A.I.” Internet puzzle that, along with thousands of others online, he spent an average of four hours a day in early April compulsively solving riddles that the film’s marketers planted across the Web like items in an electronic scavenger hunt.
It was just a few years ago that an unprecedented Internet marketing blitz turned “The Blair Witch Project” from a scrappy $30,000 art film into a $142 million smash. Now extensive Web marketing campaigns are de rigeur-especially for special-effects-filled movies targeted at teenagers. Last summer, the campaign for “The X-Men” featured a handful of Web sites alternately decrying and celebrating mutants. But nothing has come close to matching the intricacy and interactivity of the “A.I.” Web presence.
The “A.I.” game, which is set in 2142, features a large cast of characters including a fictional “machine therapist” named Jeanine Salla, a renowned expert on artificial intelligence. The game is too complicated to explain in detail here, but a basic objective is to solve the murder of Salla’s colleague and friend, Evan Chan. The game began in earnest when fans watching the “A.I.” trailer online noticed a credit for Salla and realized her name was a clue. A Web search of Salla’s name leads to several web sites connected to the game-including one for a completely fabricated Bangalore World University.
The studio isn’t talking about the game, but producers have obviously taken it very seriously. At an April screening at Harvard of clips from the film, “A.I.’s” 13-year-old star, Haley Joel Osment, told a reporter he hadn’t met Salla because she worked “mainly on postproduction.” Producer Kathleen Kennedy handed out business cards for Salla with a phone number (212-502-1177), which led to more hints.
But why did a Yale senior double-majoring in biomedical engineering and philosophy make so much time for a movie marketing stunt? According to him, the game’s just that good.
Here’s a glimpse of the kind of details that kept Fabulich and his obsessive cohorts up late at night all spring: The game’s Web sites are all registered to members of the Gepetto family. “A.I.” centers on the story of a robot boy (Osment) who is rejected by his family after his parents are able to have “real” children and sets out to become a real boy a la “Pinocchio.”
But this inside joke is just one tiny example. The riddle is so layered that brainiacs like Fabulich have respectfully dubbed the game’s designers the “puppet masters.” Game participants receive faxes, phone calls and e-mails; clues are so complex that a 6,400-member Yahoo! community called the Cloudmakers has formed around solving the puzzles. Hundreds of individual Web pages have been created to help build the mystery. The riddles led Fabulich and his Internet pals to look for answers in everything from T.S. Eliot’s famously dense poem “The Waste Land” to the Bible to Shakespeare.
“Previous games were designed to be played individually, and they were static, unchanging,” said Adrian Hon, an 18-year-old Cambridge University student who runs “The Guide,” one of several Internet sites that have sprung up to help explain the trajectory of the “A.I.” game. “This game was designed to be played collaboratively,” he continued. “If you look at the difficulty of some of the puzzles, I doubt that they could be solved in any way other than in a large group.”
Because the game is designed to promote collaboration, it is far more interactive than any previous online movie promotions. Fabulich’s group has had to get clues translated from Spanish, Japanese, German, Italian and even an Indian dialect called Kannada. Clues have even been found hidden in binary code, requiring participants to tap friends with sophisticated tech skills for help.
Perhaps the biggest clue gamers have found was in the form of notches that appeared in the words “Summer 2001” on the poster, in the trailer, and even on the film’s giant billboard in Times Square. One of the gamers counted the notches and noticed a ten-number pattern. When the same player dialed the number he saw (503-321-5122), he received his next clue in the form of a breathy woman rambling about a vast forest teeming with sex and violence and “drowned apartment buildings filled with fish.” She offers a web address (www.thevisonary.net) and a “trail of crumbs” to anyone who is lost. (When people finally get to see the movie-being released Friday, June 29-they’ll understand the references.)
As befits a Spielberg blockbuster, “A.I.’s” Web team has transcended any previous standard for Internet promotions tied to films. “I’ve never seen a Web site for a film that was this much fun, and this detailed,” says Fabulich. “And I have played other games this good on the Web, but never for free.” But don’t be mistaken: although the DreamWorks and Warner Bros. studio honchos won’t admit to producing the game, whoever’s behind the Web blitz is not acting out of altruism.
“Dollars you spend on online marketing are stretched a lot further than the dollars you spend on traditional marketing campaigns in media like TV and radio,” says Stacey Herron, entertainment and media analyst at Jupiter Media Metrix. “A traditional TV ad might spark interest in a film, but only a film site can really cultivate true obsession and extend the life of the film.”
Whoever built the maze has done the job well. “Before, I would probably have tried to see the movie if I had the free time,” reports Fabulich, whose obsession with the game didn’t keep him from graduating Yale. “Now I have to see this film.”
Just don’t sic any more murderous sounding robots on him. He’s got to get on with his life.
