Popular livestreamer Guy ‘Dr Disrespect’ Beahm recently revealed that he would be launching his own videogame studio, Midnight Society, and that he and its founding members are hiring to start development on its first game. Other than the studio revealing that it will be a competitive-focused PvP multiplayer built in Unreal Engine 5, and a couple of pieces of concept art being shared, little is known about the game.
However, for the last few days, members of the Midnight Society Discord have been embarking on what looks to be a month-long alternate reality game to learn more about what this game might entail and to potentially even gain early access to it when the time comes.
Within the Discord’s ‘conspiracy-theory-clues’ channel, dozens of players are busily at work dissecting every morsel of information they can find around Midnight Society’s first project. The ARG, which began following this January 1 tweet, involves working out a series of Discord bot commands and passwords to unlock new information, and appears to show some kind of game being played out among several characters across seven “sectors” of a map.
In just the first four days of this ARG, plenty of information has been found by those in the Discord, which includes YouTuber ‘Geeky Pastimes’, who has videos documenting each day’s progress.
Some of the information found includes brief shots of various points of interest in Sectors 1, 2, and 4, three annotated pieces of concept art, and dozens of responses from the Discord’s Midnight Protocol bot to the various commands they’ve entered. From these responses, it appears the game that’s being played out involves parties, extraction, loadouts, and the participants are all members of the Midnight Society team – including Dr Disrespect himself.
Happy New Yȩ̶̢̢͙̗̱̞̱̱̣̳̦̒ͅä̵̧̭̣̗̝͖͔́̆̾̇̏͋̿̄͛̔̿͘͝ř̷̨̨̝̺̙͚̣̼͍̘̅̈́́́̂̈́͂͑̚
// System Failure
System Reboot Required
Reboot Now? (Y/N): Y
Navigate to Root Directory
CD M:/Access
Input credentials… /// pic.twitter.com/uEbcmdkee8
— Midnight Society (@12am) January 1, 2022
The Discord also asks new members to join a faction called the Claws, and through a few steps you can seek “verification”. Throughout this ARG, it is thought that 10,000 participants (either the first to achieve a certain status or a randomly selected group) will be eligible for early access to Midnight Society’ game. A certain command to the Midnight Protocol bot will give you the reply: “Early access granted to all Variants (10,000) upon Access Pass acquisition”.
We won’t give away any more spoilers on how to access this information – finding it is half the fun, after all – but Geeky Pastimes’ videos and the Midnight Society Discord will all point you in the right direction.
We’ve seen ARGs deployed by studios and publishers several times in the past to market or tease upcoming games, and it seems Dr Disrespect’s studio is hoping to generate hype and an initial fanbase in a similar way. No Man’s Sky developer Hello Games released two variations of its Walking Titan ARG to market expansions to its space exploration game, and Activision sent Call of Duty fans on a goose chase with its Pawn Takes Pawn ARG for Black Ops Cold War.