It was started in 1995 by Tom Arriola, an experimental theater director in Oxford, Mississippi,[1] and was one of the earliest examples of an Alternate reality game, internet hoax, or superfiction.
Early on it received some criticism from viewers who, after having believed it to be part of a real murder investigation, discovered that it was actually a work of fiction.
In this way, an author tries to create a strong enough sense of authenticity that the audience goes beyond the typical suspension of disbelief that one expects to maintain when engaging with a work of fiction.
Case documents can include interviews, evidence inventories, location sketches, biographies, press articles, forensic reports, anything that would normally be collected by detectives during an investigation.
[4]In addition to producing case documents, Crime Scene hires actors to play the parts of central characters.
[5] The site also has a web store that sells crime scene supplies, something which has garnered its own share of controversy over the years, with some people complaining that there isn't any reason why members of the public should have access to things such as body bags.
"[4]Over the years, other kinds of entertainment have emerged giving more definition to what Arriola refers to as "faction", notably alternate reality games (ARGs).
[12] In Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, Janet Murray discusses the Crime Scene website as an example of storytelling innovations in the early days of the internet, citing how it allows viewers to weave between fact and fiction and at times "leap out of the story altogether and find [themselves] in the 'real' world".
In fact, the first case published on the website used the real names, driver's licenses (with registration numbers scratched out), and other personal details of the actors portraying the characters.
The way in which Crime Scene blurs the line between fiction and reality is somewhat akin to, or perhaps the inverse of, what is referred to as breaking the fourth wall.
That initial case lasted nearly two years, over which time the website attracted attention within the growing community of internet enthusiasts and early adopters, such as the online technology magazine Web Review.
[4] Crime Scene was also recognized by Cool Site of the Day, the so-called "arbiter of taste on the Internet" in the 1990s, winning the title in July 1995[16] and October 2001.
[18] He also cited the internet's first webcam, the Trojan Room coffee pot as inspiration, saying "I realized that there was something more to the Web than a bunch of data; you can do more than just search for keywords.
As Arriola explained in a television interview in 1999, "The internet in 1995... [didn’t have] any entertainment websites and so anything that you went to at that time was probably put together by a scientist or a college student and it was, for all intents and purposes, a bunch of facts.
"[2] The pragmatic nature of the early internet coupled with the website's own verisimilitude made it easy for the site's visitors to believe in its legitimacy.
One of the site's viewers called Prodigy's customer service line on two separate occasions and was reassured both times that the investigation was authentic.
[1] Responding to the criticism in an interview with the aforementioned Oxford Eagle, Arriola said, "'I used to feel bad that I tricked these people and made them upset...This reminds me of when realism hit the theaters; no one knew how to react.
'"[19] In 1999, the metal band Slipknot released their debut album with a song that was inspired by and named after the victim in one of Crime Scene's earliest cases, Purity Knight.
The band also sampled audio clips from the Crime Scene website of Purity telling a story to a little boy who had discovered her in the box in the woods and recorded her.
[21] When Crime Scene made allegations of copyright infringement, the band removed and replaced the two offending tracks and re-released the album in order to avoid a lawsuit.