I bring epic news from The Verge:
At its simplest, Endgame: The Calling is a novel about 12 teenagers scattered around the globe, participating in a high-stakes competition with the threat of the apocalypse and near-certain death looming. But the Endgame universe sprawls much further than a single book.
Endgame will eventually combine three novels with a host of other material, including shorter novellas, movies, and alternate-reality games (some of which lead to massive cash prizes of real gold) put together by Google’s Niantic Labs. It’s an ambitious, sprawling, potentially messy, potentially engrossing project that could only take place now, in a world where billions of the Earth’s inhabitants carry extremely powerful computers in their pockets everywhere they go.
It all begins today. Endgame: The Calling (by James Frey and Nils Johnson-Shelton) is now available, and the alternate-reality game will kick off tonight at the Endgame launch party in New York City. That game is the result of an intense, ongoing collaboration between Frey and Niantic, a group that is already intimately familiar with alternate reality thanks to its mobile game Ingress.
t’s not uncommon for movies or books to build universes around themselves with the internet, apps, or games -- but in the case of Endgame, these seemingly secondary pieces are being positioned as parts of the story just as essential as Frey’s novel. "Lots of people have done things in this direction, but the connection between those [different mediums] is usually fairly thin," says Niantic’s Jim Stewartson. "In this case… all of these things are connected together in a really fundamental way."
That goal comes directly from Frey, the mastermind behind Endgame who sought out Niantic to help him fully develop his universe. "Frey’s vision was to do this as a book and game and a movie all together, and to use social media as a way to extend the universe and make it a place where people could really live within the game universe," says Niantic head John Hanke. "He had this whole thing conceived of as a never-before-done experience across all these media."
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The initial round of the ARG will serve almost as a prequel, setting up the events of the first book. But going forward the campaign will interweave with the future novels -- and events that take place in the "real world" as readers and players engage with the ARG will affect the story of the upcoming books. "A lot of the direction within the overall structure [of Endgame] will be determined by what happens in the course of the experience," says Stewartson.