Super 8, JJ Abrams’ next movie, hasn’t even started shooting yet and there is already a pretty hefty viral campaign underway. A week ago a reader directed me to a site called scariestthingieversaw.com, which imitated an olde fashionedy computer terminal. There was some stuff loading on that site, and I didn’t have the patience to keep up with it. The folks at Movie Viral did, though, and they’ve unlocked all sorts of stuff, including old newspaper ads and a new fake product website (in the vein of Cloverfield‘s Slusho).
It seems like this campaign is just getting underway, but I wonder if you’ll be following it. Here’s something I learned from previous viral campaigns, like those for Cloverfield and Lost:
They usually have little to do with the actual product.
People who spent a lot of time cracking all the Cloverfield clues found a Slusho t-shirt in the movie as pretty much the only acknowledgment of all the viral backstory. I don’t know that a single thing that was revealed in the various Lost games actually mean anything in terms of the larger mysteries on the TV show. And even the very first major viral game I can remember, one for AI, proved to be utterly divorced from the actual content of the film (that game was some sort of hard boiled noir murder mystery).
If you’re looking for clues as to what Super 8 is about, I’m assuming the viral game won’t give you much. But it could be a fun thing to do on its own; a multimedia, multiplayer version of a modestly well-done video game tie-in. I’ll keep an eye on the viral, but I don’t expect much of actual interest to ever be truly revealed. At least not until the trailers hit.