Nukezilla, my Girlfriend and me

[Two weeks before Nukezilla.com became what you see it is now, it was the portal into a secret government computer system. What was revealed to be an alternate reality game (ARG) for the new site, created by Nth Digit, piqued many people's interest (including Chris') and lead a few on a twisting journey of secrets, conspiracies and an attempt to save mankind. You can see how the game developed by reading the official forum thread on it here]

Until April 22nd this year, I’d never played an ARG before. I knew what they were, sure, but reading about them afterwards was always more interesting than playing, I found… until about three weeks ago.

On April 22nd I was sat at my desk in work, enduring a long, uninteresting day like any other when a tweet from Wardrox popped up in my Twitter client, talking about problems with Nukezilla. Intrigued (and initially assuming some form of stumble in transferring URLs), I clicked through to the Negative Gamer forums, then hopped onto Nukezilla.com to see what all the fuss was about. Plan was to have a quick nose, then get straight back to work, curiosity sated.

Except that didn’t happen, did it?

Two hours later I was still banging away at the tangled and hobbled mess that the Nukezilla network was, learning about obscure encryption methods and posting in the forum which I had joined specially, all with one goal in mind: discovery. I was hooked.

Over the next few days, I spent far too much time staring at Nukezilla’s console, opening it in different browsers to save having to log in and out of different (imaginary) computers, texting US phone numbers and theorising wildly both online and to myself. My long suffering girlfriend, however, didn’t overly enjoy Nukezilla; her occasional questions of ‘œWhat’s that?’ typically answered with ‘œNukezilla. YOU WOULDN’T UNDERSTAND!’, followed by more frenzied typing as I checked make-believe email inboxes for the zillionth time before postulating on the Negative Gamer messageboards like a sugar-addled conspiracy theorist.

This does bring me to somewhat of a sticking point with the experience: I quite often felt that I was the only person putting the work in ‘“ looking at the forum shows that quite often I would post four or five times in a row with new revelations and info. On reflection, while this could have something to do with the fact that I was posting developments within a couple of hours of them occurring, the forum was rife with posts from people simply saying that it was all too complicated for them and that they’d love to help but it was too hard, which frankly, was bullshit. Before Nukezilla, I had no experience with ARGs, had never heard of base64 before, and had a good relationship with the woman I live with. Nukezilla changed all that.

Nukezilla was quite clever in that it would hold your hand up to a point with regards to story development, at which it would simply let go, leaving you free to dive into the black sea of information and data in order to explore and poke around, gently rewarding you for solving a puzzle with another nugget of excitement like a master playing fetch with his dog. At no point did the game leave you fumbling with no idea of what to look for or how to go about looking for it however, and as such Nukezilla was the perfect ARG for a very lazy man with a full time job, a social life, and an ever more abandoned feeling partner.

Each development would probably unveil around an hour’s worth of stuff to do, all of which was solvable with a quick Google search and a think ‘“ this wasn’t Valve hiding files in obscure meta information, just a simple but thought provoking little logical riddle that made for a welcome break during the day. It was simply my almost constant checking for developments or missed information that ate up my time.

Of course, I say this, but I was the one who cut a trip to the pub short in order to get home in time for the end of the game ‘“ and spent the last hour frantically scouring reams of text in various different places, determined that I was going to solve this game, and that I was going to stop Nukezilla from destroying everything I held dear (and that bothersome bint who kept demanding I put the kettle on, or cooked tea, or put trousers on because her mother was sat next to me). That night my girlfriend went to bed without me, informing me that I was ‘œobsessed with Nuclearsaurus or whatever it’s called’ – The fool! Didn’t she realise that not only was all of humanity was at stake, but I stood to win a tasty fifty pound Amazon gift voucher? She could shove that Glee DVD up her arse, I thought, before trying to remember which terminal was open in which browser and hitting the tracker to see if it had been updated again; when I won I was going to get that voucher and I was going to spend it on the best of the Insane Clown Posse, then superglue it in her car stereo ‘“ obsessed with Nukezilla indeed…

So anyway, as I refreshed three different browsers every ten seconds while reading every single comment in the YouTube videos I’d been linked to and jotting down notes about the possible identity of the eponymous user1337, something in the Nukezilla window changed.

We’d failed.

We were, in the game at least, dead. Smushed by a nuclear dinosaur lizard thing. It’s how I always wanted to go (that or suffocating on a rhubarb and custard sweet, with a book of pictures of Sophie Ellis Bextor in my hands), so I wasn’t too upset about that, but the fact that I felt like I’d failed made me feel far more upset than I’d ever have expected a game could manage.

Forlorn, I clicked the link in front of me, and listened to a song which means the end of Portal just got even better for me. I’m not sure if there was such a thing as ‘rageloling’ before that moment, but from now on it’s a word I’ll be using every time someone manages to damn near give me a heart attack, before crushing my spirit and then making me genuinely laugh out loud.

So, what did I learn from my time playing Nukezilla? First off, my girlfriend is the most patient person on the planet. While I wouldn’t have blamed her to think I was cheating on her in some ridiculously obtuse way, she simply left me to it, only mocking me endlessly when I exclaimed one morning that unfortunately, last night Nukezilla had demolished New York and that we had at most a week to live. Second, I learned that Wardrox is a little sod. And third I learned that ARGs aren’t as complicated as people think they are ‘“ just get involved and they’ll give you as much back as you put in.