Restoring the influential early 2000s alternate reality gaming forum as a static archive
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For over a decade, the Unforum, part of the ARG news site Unfiction.com, served as the backbone of the Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) community, providing a space for community discussion and the evolution of ARGs as a genre.
In 2017, a server crash took the Unforum offline. Today, through the collaborative efforts of three longtime friends and ARG players, Sean Stacey (SpaceBass), Brian Enigma (BrianEnigma), and Laura E. Hall (lehall) with the Center for Immersive Arts, the Unforum has been brought back as a static archive.
The restoration of this forum as a static archive preserves a vital piece of Alternate Reality Game (ARG) history, providing a rich resource for researchers, historians, educators and designers interested in interactive storytelling. Safeguarding the collaborative efforts and conversations of the ARG community honors the legacy of players and creators while offering a cultural snapshot of the early internet’s role in transmedia experiences. This project ensures that the Unforum’s historical and educational impact remains accessible for future generations.
ARG History and the Founding of Unforum
The early 2000s marked a transformative period for storytelling on the internet. Alternate reality games, or ARGs, are multiplayer, multimedia narrative games taking place in real time. The stories generally play out across both the internet and in real life, and blur the line between fiction and reality.
As Michael Andersen, owner of ARGN.com—one of the longest-running websites dedicated to reporting on ARGs—recalled:
“We had the triumvirate,” Andersen said. “We had The Blair Witch Project [1999], which was going into conversations of, ‘Where are the boundaries [of the story and the real world]?’ We had The Beast [March 2001], which was interrogating that question of, ‘What does it look like to piece together a story where the audience is deeply involved in that process?’ And then we had Majestic [July 2001], which was really focused on the ‘transmedia’ question of, ‘What does it look like if we take a video game and split it up across every medium, so your fax machine is part of the game?’”
Released on March 8, 2001, The Beast was designed as a promotional campaign for Steven Spielberg’s film AI: Artificial Intelligence, created by a team at Warner Bros. that included designers Jordan Weisman and Elan Lee, writer Sean Stewart, and producer/content lead Pete Fenlon. The game introduced a new, exciting genre of interactive storytelling—alternate reality games (ARGs)—which combined elements of treasure hunts and live, interactive narratives. The Beast leveraged the internet’s growing capabilities, blending online experiences with real-world interactions to create immersive, cross-platform narratives.
The players, who named themselves “Cloudmakers”, organized on Yahoo! Groups, while behind the scenes, the designers, known as “puppetmasters” unveiled a story across the web. The game was set entirely within its own fictional universe, with in-game websites designed to depict the futuristic world of 2142. Players could even interact with fictional characters like sentient machine therapist Dr. Jeanine Salla, who was investigating the mysterious death of her friend Evan Chan.
According to Andersen, this game brought together a pioneering group of players.
“There was a generation of players who came before Unfiction and the forums were a thing, before we even had the name ‘alternate reality games’,” Andersen said. “Those folks were part of The Beast’s player base, who started out on Yahoo! Groups. Then there was the next generation, where you have the first set of games that were inspired by The Beast: fan-run, fan-created, like Metacortechs and Lockjaw.”
The Beast ran for just over three months, during which time it demonstrated the vast potential of the internet as a fresh and innovative platform for new forms of storytelling. Soon after, a group of Cloudmakers created Lockjaw, a game that “[revolved] around the secret activities of fictional company GanMed Biotechnical and its work toward developing a highly controversial genetic therapy to halt the aging process.” One of those Cloudmakers, Sean Stacey, realized that players needed a place to discuss the clues, evidence, and stories in these games.
“I participated as moderator on Lockjaw,” Stacey said. “And it was during that game that we started to think that this [genre] might not just be a one-off deal—it could actually turn into something. But it was hard to explain to our friends to try to get them interested in what’s going on, to get them to participate. So that was where the genesis of Unfiction came from: to make it easier to point people to something they could read at their own pace, and look things up, and decide for themselves if they wanted to enter the alternative gaming world.”
Lockjaw ran in the spring of 2002, and Stacey registered the Unfiction.com domain “around April or May” of that year and shortly after created the website as a hard-coded HTML news page. In September, Stacey set up the Unforum, a phpBB forum, to allow the community to comment on and discuss news and articles.
The Unforum quickly became a major destination for news and discussions about new games, as well as conversations between players, moderators and creators about the genre’s broader meta elements.
“If you wanted that bird’s eye view of what is going on in alternate reality games, you could go to those forums and see everything that’s out there,” Andersen said. “[Games] would have in-universe forums, so Unfiction wasn’t necessarily always the place where gameplay conversations would happen. But Unfiction was the one place where you could really depend on the fans of alternate reality games and the fans of this space, making sure that every game was at least mentioned in a thread: ‘Hey, this thing is cool, this thing is here, this is where you should look to learn more.’”
The ARG Community and Running a Forum
With the creation of the Unforum, a unique set of norms, rules, and vocabulary began to take shape within the ARG community. One of the core principles that emerged was the concept of willingly suspending disbelief while knowingly engaging in the storyworld created by the game’s designers. Players embraced the ethos of “This is not a game” (TINAG), immersing themselves in the narrative and interacting within the story as though it were part of the reality outside of the game.
However, to maintain a clear distinction between the game world and the discussion space, the forums were strictly designated as “Out of Game” (OOG). This ensured that puppetmasters—game creators and writers working behind the scenes—would not interact with players in character or drop in-game clues within the forums. By establishing this separation, the community could engage in thoughtful analysis and collaboration without disrupting the immersive experience of the ARG itself.
The Unforum was also a unique resource, providing a dedicated space that facilitated deep discussions among a committed community of ARG enthusiasts—conversations that continue to hold significance for those interested in the history and development of ARGs.
“For me, the absolute goldmine of information that we’re missing [due to the forum crash] is the ‘Puppetmaster Chats’ and ‘Player Chats’ discussions,” Andersen said. “This was an entire section of the Unfiction forums dedicated to discourse and dedicated to breaking down, ‘Hey? What does it mean to be playing these games? What should we be doing? What shouldn’t we be doing? And how are some of the ways that we can evolve as a space as conversations happening within one of those key places of the scene?’”
Over its 15 years of operation, the Unforum became the central hub for discussions about hundreds of ARGs, with 38,762 users contributing 1,045,728 posts. However, as ARGs gradually fell out of favor as a marketing tool, and with the decline of blogs and the rise of social media platforms like Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook, activity on the forums began to slow, while the cost of operating the forum remained the same. Although the site received donations from members, it didn’t have a source of sustainable revenue.
“The revenue question was recurrent,” Stacey said. “I would ask people, do you wanna help support the forums? And 95% of people would say, ‘Just run ads,’ and not really accept the fact that our audience was techno literate, who ignore ads and run adblockers.”
Stacey was also aware of the unique dynamic between ARG players and creators—ARGs are often marketing tools and their makers carefully monitor discussions to track player progress.
“When you become dependent on ads, you can either have the generic ads that don’t matter who the audience is, or you can have ads that are more tailored to your audience,” Stacey said. “Then it’s probably going to be the people making alternate reality games [placing the ads], and then you have the question of whether or not you can maintain any kind of editorial independence. … It’s always going to be in the back of your mind: ‘If I let this discussion happen this way, is that going to affect whether or not they pull the ads from the site?’ And then, alternate reality gaming discussions kind of started dwindling, and people did start talking in other locations, too, like Reddit, which started to become a thing around then.”
The Forum Crash
Then came a catastrophe: in 2017, a fatal server crash took the Unforum offline. The forums had been running on outdated software, which made restoration efforts both technically complex and financially prohibitive. To make matters more difficult, Sean Stacey, who did not have a technical background, was already facing significant personal challenges. In late 2016, a tree had fallen on Stacey’s home, forcing him to evacuate in the middle of the night without access to his computers or other resources. Coupled with burnout from years of managing the community and the mounting costs of keeping the servers running, Stacey ultimately concluded that it would not be feasible to bring the Unforum back online.
“For the most part, I paid 75, 80 percent of the cost of running it,” Stacey said. “Unfortunately, right after people started to rally and figure out that they needed to do something to save the forums, that’s when the server crashed. The forums were so out of date at that point that it was beyond my ability to restore them. So the only way to keep them running as they were was either convert them to some other kind of forum software, which would have lost so much of the functionality that we built in over time that was specifically tailored to our needs, rewrite the software, or figure out a way to run it on old, insecure servers.”
Further, because the forums had been operating for so long, server costs had changed dramatically.
“I was originally hosting the forum on some random shared hosting site, which wasn’t able to keep up with traffic surges. I had gone to Rackspace to see if I could host the forums on there, and the prices were out of my range,” Stacey said. “They referred me to ServerBeach, and the idea was that they didn’t do any management of it, but it was a lot cheaper and affordable. For a long time leading up to the crash we were actually running on two dedicated servers, one for the database and one for the front end. The front-end server is the one that crashed, which is why the database was still intact.”
“[ServerBeach] got bought out, and by the time the forums crashed, if I wanted to upgrade the server, the price would have been 10 times as high for a basic server,” Stacey added. “It was not a sustainable thing for a site that doesn’t have any kind of consistent revenue. So that kind of decided it: there wasn’t anything I could do, and the traffic even then was probably too much for it to just be hosted on Dreamhost.”
On July 26, 2017, Stacey announced on Twitter that the forum had crashed. And since then, they’ve been offline…until today, February 3, 2025.
The Unforum Restoration
In January 2024, I was working on the project that would become this site, the Center for Immersive Arts (CFIA).
One thing that kept coming up in my work was the old Unforum. The forums were an invaluable part of the community, and so key to the experience of participating in these games, finding out about new ones, talking about both playing and making ARGs, and participating in community.
Ever since the server crash in 2017, I had idly wondered what it would take to get them back online. And then, back in 2024, I was chatting about it with Brian Enigma, longtime ARG player, Puzzled Pint board member, and creator of the Perplex City Wiki and the Perplex City Card Catalog.
Brian mentioned that he would be able to work on it—and in fact had recently completed a large upgrade project on another website with similar complications, and so was uniquely qualified to tackle the Unforum project.
Over the next year, Brian was able to get the server up and running on an old version of Apache and PHP, and with Sean’s help, was able to access old files and uploads. After clearing out database bugs and much more, he created a static snapshot of the forums, which took about 5 days, with about 134 gb of files.
That static snapshot is now viewable live on the web at the classic URL: https://forums.unfiction.com/
The Center for Immersive Arts: A Note from Laura E. Hall
I started the Center for Immersive Arts website in 2024 to preserve, educate, and facilitate community. The CFIA and this restoration have happened thanks to the generous support of my backers on Patreon. Please consider backing the Center for Immersive Arts on Patreon today and making more projects like this possible.
As a longtime ARG player and member of the Unforum, I’m excited to be a part of the effort to restore the forums. Thanks to Brian and Sean’s efforts, the site can live on as a static archive, as a resource for anyone doing research, feeling nostalgic, or curious to learn about how these games played out. It’s a snapshot of a significant moment in time, and of the many people who came together to form a creative community around these games. The Unforum was an important part of my past, and I hope that with these efforts, its legacy will live on into the future.
If you enjoyed the Unforum archive, please consider supporting me and my work on the Center for Immersive Arts with a recurring pledge on Patreon.
The support of Patreon backers like Ariock ®, Shiina Markov, Beth Wilbins, Cameo Wood and Kathryn Yu make this project possible! Join them as a supporter today — as a bonus you’ll get early access to posts like this, plus a behind-the-scenes look at the immersive history projects I’m working on, as I’m working on them.
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