The Beast

~ the eulogy ~

In the spring of 2001 i was seventeen and getting online at home over a modem. The Beast wanted you to dial telephone numbers in the united states and watch television spots that never aired here. None of that was reachable from turkey at a price a schoolboy would pay, so what i have is the reconstruction, same as almost everyone who was not in the room.

The way in was a credit. In march 2001 the trailer for Steven Spielberg's A.I. Artificial Intelligence listed Jeanine Salla as sentient machine therapist, a job that does not exist attached to a person who did not either. Posters for the film carried a phone number, and certain letters in the credit block were raised so that reading only the raised ones gave you a sentence. Evan Chan was murdered. Jeanine is the key.

Behind that sat about fifty websites and something close to a thousand pages, built by a small team at Microsoft under Jordan Weisman with Sean Stewart writing the words. There was no signup and no rules page anywhere in it. The game never once admitted to being a game, which is where the phrase "this is not a game" comes from.

For the first few weeks roughly a hundred people were playing. Then Harry Knowles wrote it up on Ain't It Cool News on 11 april and the site took twenty five million hits that day. The players who came in formed a Yahoo Group called the Cloudmakers, which grew to nearly five thousand members before the film opened.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

The mechanism that made it work was that nobody could finish it alone. A puzzle would want somebody who could read a spectrogram, or somebody willing to drive to a particular parking lot in another state. The Cloudmakers had those people because they had five thousand people, and the puppetmasters kept discovering that content budgeted for a week was gone in an afternoon.

The other half was that it answered back. Mail sent to characters who did not exist came back with replies somebody had written that morning. A marketing campaign does not do this. That is why people gave it their nights.

~ what got buried with it ~

None of this sold the film. A.I. opened on 29 june 2001 into a split reception and nobody has ever argued the game put anyone in a seat. The Beast was supposed to end with the release and drifted a few weeks past it into july before the puppetmasters closed it out for good.

The group outlasted the game by a season. After the september 11 attacks some members proposed reassembling to work out who was responsible, on the reasoning that a crowd able to solve a fictional murder could take on a real one. The idea was raised and it was talked down, because people playing detective alongside a live investigation get other people hurt. The line between the game and the world had never needed drawing until that week, and then it did.

~ what replaced it ~

Weisman and Elan Lee left Microsoft and started 42 Entertainment. In 2004 they built I Love Bees to advertise Halo 2, carrying the same shape over: an out-of-place detail in a trailer, then a crowd assembling to take apart a website that will not explain itself.

In march 2022, twenty one years after it stopped, The Beast was given a Legacy Peabody Award in the digital and interactive category. The form starts here, and so does the part nobody found a fix for. Build a month of puzzles for a large enough crowd and they will be finished before dinner.

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