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The most advanced online escape room game you've never heard about - NIN's Year Zero ARG Documentary

Woochia - Charly Sauret

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Year Zero is a concept album released by Nine Inch Nails (NIN) in 2007.
This album was released along with an alternate reality game (ARG) written by Trent Reznor and executed by 42 entertainment.
This ARG lead the players through dozens of websites describing a dystopian future and a resistance taking form against it.
Today, most sources (wikipedia, webzines, ...) describe the album and the story of this dystopian future, but not how the story was presented to the audience. Worst than that, the websites used for the game are now all offline and used Adobe Flash, so all this content is being lost.
This video is a documentary putting you in the shoes of a fan in 2007, gathering the clues left by the band and following the trails like a detective, from website to website.
Before this experience is lost forever, this is the Year Zero ARG.

0:00 Intro

1:07 Chapter 1: I am trying to believe

3:48 Chapter 2-1: My violent heart
4:28 Chapter 2-2: Another version of the truth
7:01 Chapter 2-3: Be the hammer
8:10 Chapter 2-4: 105th airborne crusaders
9:07 Chapter 2-5: Consolidated mail systems
10:12 Chapter 2-6: Church of Plano

10:58 Chapter 3-1: 24.3.2
12:23 Chapter 3-2: US wiretap

14:05 Chapter 4-1: Art is resistance
14:52 Chapter 4-2: Resistance is coming
15:59 Chapter 4-3: Secure broadcast informatics

18:06 Chapter 5-1: Survivalism
19:14 Chapter 5-2: The water turned to blood
19:58 Chapter 5-3: Judson Ogram
22:53 Chapter 5-4: The bridge
23:24 Chapter 5-5: Cedocore

23:51 Chapter 6: The mailstrom

25:37 Chapter 7-1: The price of treason
26:39 Chapter 7-2: open source resistance
27:39 Chapter 7-3: Be an informer
28:19 Chapter 7-4: Free rebel art

29:26 Chapter 8-1: Red horse vector
30:27 Chapter 8-2: Exterminal
32:19 Chapter 8-3: AVOTT 0

36:26 Chapter 9-1: Melrose and Ogden
37:44 Chapter 9-2: The booklet
39:26 Chapter 9-3: The meeting
40:51 Chapter 9-4: Exhibit 24

42:23 Chapter 10: You don't need us anymore

43:05 Additional details
43:50 Thanks
44:25 The vote (next video)

~SOURCES~

NIN wiki:
The most complete source, with the most references and theories.
https://www.nin.wiki/Timeline_of_Year...

wonderweasels/yearzero:
Excellent to cross-reference with the NIN wiki, it also contains a full transcription of every site, which is a lot easier to read.
https://wonderweasels.org/yearzero/gu...

Wikipedia/campain timeline of year zero:
Contains link to each site on archive.org, which gives you a greater chance to see the websites as they were at the time
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaig...

yearzero.netninja:
Archive of all the media used in the campaign: the audio files, images and even the html and css of every websites. In the notes/trail you also have a timeline of the events. In the Mirrors folder it also contains the websites used during the game, in case they don’t work with archive.org.
https://yearzero.netninja.com/

Archive.org:
Allows you to visit older version of websites. Useful to visit sites that don’t exist anymore.
https://archive.org/

Flash player for chrome:
Allows you to play flash content in chrome. Try it on the saved version of the website on yearzero.netninja for a better chance to work.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/de...

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20 Comments

@Woochia Creator 3 years ago Pinned

In case you don't know Nine Inch Nails, know that you know Nine Inch Nails nonetheless:
- They made the original sample that was used to create "Old Town Road" by Lil Nas X ft. Billy Ray Cyrus. The original song was on "Ghosts I - IV" which was released under Creative Commons License.
- Their song "Head Like a Hole" is the song sung by Miley Cyrus in Black Mirror.
- They produced the first and second album of Marilyn Manson, so maybe we could say they started his career.
- They composed music and lent their logo to the game Quake (1996)
- I say "they" and "the band" but Nine Inch Nails was only Trent Reznor from 1988 to 2016, then he's been joined by Atticus Ross.

@SeniorMoistener 2 years ago

I can only imagine how life changing it would be to unexpectedly attend a concept by your favorite band put on just for you, because you did the detective work to get there. Man...

@joshkaid 2 years ago

"Blurs the line between killing and fucking" is such a bone chilling sentence.

@BunnychanFarabee 11 months ago

Now, we are actually living in the Year Zero universe.

@Veninax 1 year ago

It is bad to say how prophetic Year Zero as a project was.

@CatFish107 7 months ago

Remember when paranoid and axious "parent groups" thought bands were putting hidden messages in their albums?

Trent said, "Oh, you haven't seen anything yet"

@goon-705 1 year ago

it's crazy how they were really only two years off

@sillypinkewe 1 year ago

Turns out Year Zero was a bit early. Not '22 but '25.

@nickpickerwi7787 3 years ago

I lived through all of this and was changed by it.

Looking back, from where we are now, I knew it was a warning but assumed it was far-fetched. I now know it wasn't.

Thank you for putting this together. I have a few people to send this to.

@pauly260 2 years ago

I was in the army, fresh from my third tour in Iraq when this ARG dropped. It stated what I saw in all directions; an end to privacy, religious nationalism & hardcore conservative neoliberalism all combined. Truly happy you made this video.

@pumpkin-head-and-me 2 years ago

NiN (Trent) has always been on the bleeding edge of new media and new tech. This is just a great example of them leveraging digital guerilla marketing — amaze-balls.

@TheRetroRenegade 3 years ago

I started looking into the Year Zero concept maybe about a year ago (ironic, considering that was the year it was meant to take place in) and found it was a rabbit hole I had no idea existed back in 2007. What a fascinating crossover of political protest music and internet exploration via an alternate reality game (a genre I wasn't even aware of until looking into Year Zero).

The biggest shame regarding the album is that a lot of its context was dependent on participation in this ARG which will sadly never be able to be experienced the same way again. It sadly wasn't "meant to last" but rather "for right now" (in 2007), and thus all people can do right now (in 2023) is look back at it in hindsight and the history of its discovery by players back then.

But I think you did an excellent job of documenting the experience from 16 years ago and how it all played out, and will hopefully enhance the album itself for many people discovering it today and will hopefully keep the message relevant for years to come.

@macidiot 3 years ago

This was awesome. Been a NIN fan since 94 and when this happened I was too wrapped up in adult life to focus on any of it. Thank you for putting this together!

@DavidGarcia-sd1kt 1 year ago

I was late to this ARG but I will always remember how skin crawling the story made me feel. The idea of government survallince, mental manipulation, government poisoning as well as contaminations, etc.

Scary thing is the ARG gets more and more prophetic as the years go by.

@FoxInferno13 3 years ago

This is my favorite Nine Inch Nails album by a country fuckin' mile and the ARG is 75% the reason why 🤣🤣🤣

@asdrugrohl 3 years ago

I've been waiting for someone to compile/recap the arg experience! Thank you

@fragile00 3 years ago

Just revisited this era and it got me thinking now that Trent has all this movie industry connections maybe he can work on the Year Zero tv series he talked about many years ago. The marketing for this album was next level (same company who did Halo and many other ARG games, I forgot the name).

2007 was such a crazy year and Year Zero was the cherry on top.

@Drakengard82 1 year ago

Some of the clues were so unhinged haha the amount of work they put in is insane

That last phone message hits different in 2025

@j.b.666 2 years ago

Great video! I was DEEP in this ARG. Obsessed. There were details you covered that I forgot about and some I didn't even know about. There is even a pic of me at the mural in LA that I have never seen. I was at the Resistance Meeting, what a crazy experience that was. Thanks for doing this video! I can send this to friends now because I always have a hard time describing all of it.

@RolandVenesz 8 months ago

There was one site I remember that you didn't mention. It was a live chat unfolding in front of your eyes between the SBI people as they're sending back all the information to -15, and it looks like they're about to be raided. It was amazing.