Year Zero (game)

Year Zero is an alternate reality game (ARG) by American studio 42 Entertainment based on the Nine Inch Nails concept album of the same name.

[1] Although the album was released on April 16, 2007, in Europe, and the following day worldwide,[2] the game had been underway since roughly February 12, 2007, and was expected to continue for approximately eighteen months.

I decided to write an essay about where the world might be if we continue down the path that we're on with a neo-con-esque government doing whatever it pleases...[9]To this end, the storyline of Year Zero borrows heavily from such well-known dystopian fiction as George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (government surveillance), Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (use of drugs to subdue the populace), Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (large-scale censorship and uniformism), and Yevgeny Zamyatin's We (synthesis of church and state).

Specific plot elements bear a resemblance to the Philip K. Dick short story Faith of Our Fathers, including hallucinogens in the water supply, an oppressive, heavily militaristic state, aggressive government monitoring of the populace, and a venerated entity which manifests in many forms.

The U.S. government is now a Christian fundamentalist theocracy, maintaining control of the populace through institutions like the Bureau of Morality and the First Evangelical Church of Plano, and locked into near constant war abroad against their aggressors, with the implied ulterior motive to expand their spheres of influence.

The government corporation Cedocore distributes the drug Parepin through the water supply, under the guise of it being an "immune booster" to prevent future bioterrorism attacks.

Amidst all of this are increasing sightings of what is labeled "The Presence", which manifests as a pair of massive ghostly hands and arms extending down from the sky into the ground.

Despite early attributions of The Presence to drug-induced mass hysteria, it soon becomes clear that it is a physical phenomenon capable of being recorded on video and film, although grainy and unfocused.

Meanwhile, the Solutions Backwards Initiative - a group of students, professors, and computer experts - devise a successful means with which to send information back through time using quantum mechanics in order to prevent the dystopian future (and eventual apocalypse) they live in from ever occurring.

The websites and music of the Year Zero alternate reality game are implied to be part of the information packets sent back through the wormholes, activated only moments after Doug's message.

"[17] In 2008, 42 Entertainment won two Webby Awards for their work on the Year Zero game, under the categories of "Integrated Campaigns" and "Other Advertising: Branded Content".