Ong's Hat is one of the earliest Internet-based secret history conspiracy theories. It was created as a piece of collaborative fiction by four core individuals, dating back to the 1980s, although the membership propagating the tale changed over time. Ong's Hat is often cited as the first alternate reality game on many lists of ARGs.
The characters were largely based in the ghost town of Ong's Hat, New Jersey, hence the name of the project.
History
The threads of the story can be traced back as far as the 1980s on bulletin board systems, and via mail art networks, early zines, and faxlore. The aim was to create a fictional story line, and embed it in various media cultures to establish backstories. It may have started as an in-joke, or the first alternate reality game (ARG), a work of transmedia storytelling or as a memetic experiment, to see how far the meme could spread or a combination of all of the above. The story eventually used print, radio, television and digital media (CD-ROM, DVD, Internet, BBS) in its dissemination.
The initial ground rules acknowledged the possibility that such an experiment could end up going down darker paths, and they specifically ruled out Ong's Hat being used for cult-like activity. Even though it is a fiction, the tale may be based on earlier works.
Joseph Matheny eventually concluded the project. GamesTM magazine wrote that "Ong’s Hat was more of an experiment in transmedia storytelling than what we would now consider to be an ARG but its DNA – the concept of telling a story across various platforms and new media – is evident in every alternate reality game that came after."
In 2002, Lego created an ARG for their line of toys for Canadian children's TV series Galidor: Defenders of the Outer Dimension that featured some elements of the Ong's Hat story.
Plot
The Ong's Hat narrative is told in the form of conspiracy theories surrounding a group of renegade Princeton professors who had conducted quantum physics and chaos theory experiments to discover a new theory for dimensional travel using a device called "the egg", and were camped out in a parallel world.