bandanna face-off

I’ve been kinda keeping an eye on Year Zero, the Nine Inch Nails ARG/experience/not totally shady and fairly organic marketing campaign. Yesterday evening, there was a live event in Los Angeles, not too far down the street from my office. So off I went.

The gist of the event was that Steve Peters from 42 gave out 1″ buttons to players when they showed up. There’s a large Year Zero mural on Melrose at Ogden. We were to meet under the pig on the mural, and follow the aim of the revolver across the street to an unmarked van when it arrived. The van arrived around 7, and we completely stopped traffic on Melrose in order to cross the street to get to the van. Good times.

The van contained heavy kits for each participant. Most of the kits were identical, but a few boxes marked with a red star contained cell phones for further gameplay next week. Yeah, I didn’t get a cool box. I’m pretty sure that the few people to whom Steve gave yellow pins got the red boxes.

One of the things inside the box is a bandanna with the Art Is Resistance flag on it. The photo here shows the Anti-Robot Militia bandanna that I got at a live event for The Beast in New York way back in 2001.

Other pictures from the event are on Flickr here.

If you’re interested in the game, as always, check out Unfiction.

After all that, I went out to a gig last night. It was disappointing, but this is now.