12 SPECIAL REPORT
How the spooky launched a fascinating ARG
The odd world of NoPlayersOnline.
The game starts with an image of a VHS tape, hovering on your desktop. Click on that, and the game begins with a sketchy MS-DOS-style menu. A multiplayer server list appears on the screen. They’re all empty. Click on one, and you enter a lonely CTF match of a Quake- era FPS, with blocky geometry and fuzzy textures. Return the flag once, and strange things start happening: Twin Peaks-esque music will blare from a record player that appears in one part of the map. A mysterious dark figure appears to be watching you, flickering away as you get closer.
The dark figure reappears. You discover the server is keeping someone alive. Its creator joins the game, and begs you not to return the flag for a third and final time. When you do, this short, free narrative game on itch.io called No Players Online ends. An empty multiplayer map, it turns out, is a fantastic setting for a horror game.
“For me it started because I was doing a course in level design, so we were building a level for Unreal Tournament,” says designer Adam Pype, who made No Players Online with friends Viktor Klaus and Ward D’Heer. “When you make a level, you spend a lot of time just walking around empty maps, and observing the environment and checking the design. I thought it was a real cool atmosphere, just walking around multiplayerdesigned maps all on your own. I thought this would be a good premise for a horror thing.”
Pype submitted the game to the Haunted PS1 jam in November 2019. That should’ve been the end of No Players Online, but it wasn’t. What came next was an sprawling, unsettling ARG that involved a Belgian phone number, a real-life note hidden in a forest, and an entirely different game that hid clues to unraveling the true ending. This would capture the imaginations of an audience of amateur sleuths.
ARGs, or ‘Alternate Reality Games’, are elaborate puzzles that draw on out-of-game and real world elements that fans have to investigate and figure out. No Players Online grew into an ARG simply because people were over-thinking what was already there.
“You’d play for ten minutes or something, that’s what we made in the first four days to put in for the jam,” Pype says. “I added a small Easter egg that if you quit out of the game and played it again, there was one line [of dialogue] that was different. But after the game launched and got attention, I saw videos of people finding that Easter egg and being obsessed, thinking there must be more to it. I thought I’d screw with them, and add a little extra part to it, so that something would happen. And we kept on adding stuff until we accidentally made an entire ARG.”
The developer would add a fake email address to the game’s itch.io page. Emailing that gave you a spooky autoreply from a fictional developer. In the signature, there was a link to a Geocities-esque itch.io page for an unknown game called EYE.
EYE is about walking a dog down a dark path, but you can never actually see the dog. After a minute of walking, you come to a pier. When you walk off the pier, a nasty sound effect plays and EYE closes. Another image of a VHS tape appears on your desktop, mirroring the start of No Players Online. That video offers another clue that leads to its true finale. The idea of using an entirely different game to help solve the mystery is very cool, and it helps you buy into this fiction of longabandoned game projects that have taken on a sinister life of their own.
GHOST STORIES
An entire community formed around solving the game’s many mysteries. “They set up a Discord server, where they were solving the riddles,” says sound designer Viktor Klaus. “And I actually joined it, because my name wasn’t in the credits for No Players Online itself back then, and they didn’t know I actually worked on the game. And I saw them solving everything. We thought they would solve it in a week, and they solved it in an hour or something. It was amazing.”
“It was really made up on the go,” Pype says. Not all parts of the ARG were solved by players—an automated phone message hiding Morse code had to be published on
Bandcamp because the audio quality was too poor on a traditional landline. In one instance, too, a code was found by datamining the game rather than solving it as intended.
“It was really difficult to balance it as too easy or too hard,” Pype says. “It was either too easy that they solved it in an hour, or it was too hard that they didn’t solve it and datamined everything. I feel like that’s definitely a big problem with ARGs, just getting the difficulty right.” The finale of No Players Online takes place in a hidden developer room, where you have to enter the right number to makes the credits roll.
The final step of the ARG involved figuring out coordinates that, when entered onto Google Maps, gave you the location of a forest in Belgium. Someone actually traveled there in person, and then found a strange poem written on a piece of paper. No Players Online’s premise was already great, but this extremely detailed metagame, and the sheer amount of effort people went to to uncover the truth behind it, makes it a bit mythical.
I ask the developers why they reckon it resonated as much as it did. “I think it really captured people’s imaginations because it’s something you can keep talking about,” Pype says. “It’s a real community event. But the game itself, what’s really interesting for us about the initial reception of the game, is seeing people who could relate to being alone on a server. I think we tapped into this very specific nostalgia that a lot of people have.”
Samuel Roberts
AN ENTIRE COMMUNITY FORMED AROUND SOLVING THE GAME’S MANY MYSTERIES