So this is what an undisclosed location looks like, I thought.

It was a balmy early spring evening in 2005 and I was standing outside an anonymous block of flats in south-west London. It was one of those buildings that originally provided affordable council housing for inner-city families but had since been bought by developers and turned into ‘luxury apartments’ to keep young professionals safe from the drug addicts and ASBO kids that, for some reason, inhabit the capital’s streets. It was all key-pad access and CCTV, and yet with so much glass that it practically screamed ‘throw a rock at me’. I managed to resist.

Instead, I found the number I was looking for and pressed a chrome buzzer.

Silence.

Did it even work? Was buzzing too working class for this place?

I pressed again.

A few moments later the door opened with a barely audible click and I stepped inside, pulling the door firmly closed behind me. I was on the inside now. Safe. Just a smooth lift ride was all that remained between me and the fifth floor: the gateway to Perplex City.

Everything inside Perplex City was overwhelming. The walls were painted a stark – almost blinding – white. Likewise the furniture – what little there was – and even the mugs in the kitchen were plain white. The open-plan flat was full of perhaps a dozen people, crammed together around the plain white desks, tapping and clicking away at their computers.

No one even glanced up from their work as I walked in.

Secrecy is everything at Perplex City. Secrecy and flat-screen monitors, literally dozens of which were crammed into that small, white room that acted as the top-secret headquarters for what would, one man hoped, become the most talked-about phenomenon of the coming summer.

The first anyone knew about Perplex City was when cryptic adverts started appearing in newspapers around the world, including the Guardian and the New York Times, appealing for help in finding a mysterious missing object known as ‘the Cube’.

No contact information was given on the adverts – just a link to a site called perplexcity.com. Meanwhile, around the world hundreds of postcards simultaneously appeared in clubs, bars, shops and other public places, all containing subtle clues that led to the same website.

The chatter on the Internet was clear: something fucking weird was going down. And the reason I was in south-west London was because I was one of the few people who knew exactly what it was.

2.1

During the dot com crash of 2000, not every interesting Internet company had gone bust. Not every daring entrepreneur had lost everything – nor had all of them cashed in their millions just in time and retired to a south sea island while their peers went to the wall. A few (mainly those with the deepest pockets, who hadn’t squandered their investment on flights on Concorde for senior executives, or office furniture made out of reclaimed airline parts) had seen the storm coming and adapted their businesses accordingly to ride out the crisis.

Two of these bright young survivors were Michael Smith and Tom Boardman.

Michael and Tom met at university and soon became firm friends, bonding over their twin passions of drinking and playing games. Well, three passions really: they also enjoyed playing drinking games. One day, while playing chess and drinking vodka, the idea came to them: why not combine their passions and replace these boring old chess pieces with shot glasses? Every time you took a piece, you took a shot.

Simple, but brilliant. They called their invention ‘Shot Glass Chess’.

Before long, the brainiac twosome had rolled in their fourth love – making money – and had drawn up a business plan for a mail order company that would sell Shot Glass Chess, along with a whole host of other boys’ toys. And how better to start a business, when you’re fresh out of university and working out of your tiny rented flat, than by setting up shop on the Internet? After all, this was 1998 and there was a dot com boom going on.

To fund the business they pitched up at a dot com networking event called ‘First Tuesday’ clutching their business plan and – in a story that would become Internet legend – walked away a few hours later with a deal that would give them seven figures of venture capital investment to start their business. They decided to call the company ‘Hotbox.co.uk’ and their first logo was a little box with fire coming out of it. You couldn’t fault their branding.

You also couldn’t fault their flair for publicity. The company’s first press cutting, which Michael and Tom still display proudly in their (now considerably larger and more opulent) shared flat, is a review of Shot Glass Chess from a Scandinavian porn magazine. It features two topless models getting drunk and playing chess. Swede dreams are made of those.

A couple of years later, when the dot com crash came, Hotbox was determined not to go to the wall. The company had low overheads, growing revenues and decent profit margins, and Michael and Tom were confident they could stay afloat if they expanded their business beyond the UK into the lucrative international market. Going international would mean making some big changes. For a start they would need to take the momentous step of moving from being the UK-centric Hotbox.co.uk to the world-beating Hotbox.com.

There was just one tiny problem: the name Hotbox.com was already owned by a rival site offering boys’ toys.

Where by boys’, I mean men’s.

And by toys I mean hardcore pornography.

Hotbox.com was the home of ‘Danni’s Hot Box’, owned by Danni Ashe, a forty-year-old former erotic dancer and probably the most famous and successful female Internet porn celebrity, unless you count Paris Hilton.

Using the Hotbox name internationally was a non-starter for Michael and Tom and so with a bit of thinking outside the – um – box, Firebox.com was born. With its new international client base, the company rode out the dot com crash like a mother. By 2004, Firebox was listed in the Sunday Times Fast Track 100 as the thirteenth fastest growing privately owned business in the UK. And it was in that same year that I first met Michael, all thanks to a phone call from my friend Emily Dubberley.

Emily’s name will very possibly be familiar if you are a reader of any one of the zillions of women’s magazines that Emily contributes to. She is what women’s magazines charmingly call a ’sexpert’, and a better example of the genre you’ll struggle to find. That is, a woman whose job it is to have an enormous amount of extremely filthy, adventurous sex, and write about it, so that the rest of us might feel inadequate in both imagination and stamina. She is also the founder of Cliterati.co.uk, the UK’s finest and most gloriously named repository of female-oriented ‘erotic fiction’ (porn stories) and was also the founding editor of Scarlet, the sex magazine for which I’d reviewed porn DVDs when I first arrived in London.

She is, you will have surmised, excellent company and a wonderful lush.

I always smile when I see ‘Emily’ flash up on my mobile’s screen, knowing that when she calls there’s a good chance it’s to tell me a brilliantly indiscreet story about someone famous she’s just kicked out of her flat, or perhaps her bed.

‘Hello, darling,’ she cooed, her vocal chords softened by a thousand blow jobs (she has run one-day courses at London’s trendy Soho House, teaching Sloanes how to suck. I’m not making any of this up.) ‘I’m in Soho with Michael Smith. I thought you might like to meet him.’

Now, if there’s one thing Emily enjoys more than sex (and know this: there isn’t), it’s networking – making introductions between people who might be useful to each other in some way. She seems to know everyone, and not just in a biblical sense. Porn stars, entrepreneurs, strippers, actors, burlesque dancers, journalists, sex toy inventors, politicians… you name them, she’s got them on speed dial. I’d asked Emily to keep an eye out for anyone she thought might make an interesting subject for my Guardian column and she’d decided that Michael might fit the bill. Specifically, she thought I might be able to give him some coverage for his first new venture after Firebox.

And so it was that I ended up in the Lab Bar on Old Compton Street, supping a hugely overpriced rum and coke and watching Emily flirting her arse off with a young and phenomenally wealthy entrepreneur.

To be fair, it is hard not to be impressed by Michael – not just the head of the thirteenth fastest growing private company in the UK but also irritatingly good looking in that slightly dishevelled way that girls seem to like but which, whenever I try to emulate it, I just end up looking like I’m trying to sell them The Big Issue . He was also, thanks to Firebox, very wealthy indeed.

What an absolute cunt, I thought.

And to make matters worse, he was drinking orange juice. In the middle of the afternoon!

Naturally, I hoped whatever new venture Michael was setting up would turn out to be awful, an idea so bad that, when it launched, he would be scandalised in the press, lose all of his money and perhaps even his youthful looks. I am, you’ll understand, the jealous type.

‘So,’ I asked, sipping my rum and coke, ‘tell me about this new idea of yours.’

Putting down his orange juice – cunt – he reached into the pockets of his designer jeans and pulled out three or four brightly coloured pieces of cardboard, which looked to me a lot like giant trading cards. Each one had a different puzzle drawn on it: a maze, some kind of picture puzzle featuring a Manga-esque woman, a photograph of some biscuits, if I remember correctly.

‘Puzzles?’ I asked, aiming for dismissive and smacking head first into jealous.

Michael looked defensive, and sighed with the weariness of a man who gets that a lot. ‘No, not puzzles… Well, not really. I can’t say too much, but basically we’ve created a new kind of puzzle game. It combines very special puzzles with a treasure hunt.’

‘I get it,’ I lied. ‘How exactly will it work?’

‘We’re not saying yet.’

Of course you’re not saying. Why would you tell me anything? It’s not like I’ve come all the way across London and paid eight fucking pounds for a rum and coke just to hear about your idea. You just keep it to yourself and enjoy your orange juice.

Cunt.

The truth is, while I wanted so much – so much – to dislike Michael and his idea, I couldn’t. On the contrary, I could see there were all sorts of possibilities in what he was talking about. Possibilities for combining puzzles with storytelling to engage with an audience in a really deep, emotional way. To use puzzles to actually allow a story to play out inside people’s heads. I knew all of this because what Michael was describing was an Alternate Reality Game, or ARG.

2.2

When history considers the phenomenon of early twenty-first-century film hype, two letters will stand out like twin, towering, disappointing giants. A cinematic atrocity of World Trade Center proportions.

A 9/11 of mediocrity.

Those letters are ‘AI’. Make no mistake, Steven Spielberg’s 2001 roboflick Artificial Intelligence: AI was by far the most grotesque example of over-hyping and under-delivering effluent ever to be discharged from the Hollywood creative sewer. Horrible dialogue, a gushingly over-sentimental plot and three – or was it four? – dire endings, each more of a mawkish non sequitur than the last.

I saw the film at university, sitting next to a girl I was head over heels in love with – more on her later – and I actually walked out of the auditorium to buy a hot dog. Anything to escape the tedium of the worst film ever made.

But to be fair to Spielberg, it is hard to imagine how any film could possibly live up to the very special kind of hype that preceded its release. While most films make do with an advertising poster campaign and some kind of fast-paced trailer with a dramatic voiceover, the marketing team responsible for AI commissioned Microsoft (the world’s biggest computer company and inventor of the world’s most condescending talking paperclip) to create a brand new kind of interactive advertisement.

Code-named ‘The Beast’, it was not so much a piece of marketing as a totally immersive on-and-offline adventure game that grabbed players by the throat and threw them into a fantasy world of murder, intrigue and seemingly unsolvable puzzles.

It worked like this. Hidden in the posters and cinema adverts for the film were a series of dots that corresponded to a phone number. Cinema-goers smart enough to decipher the code and dial the number would hear a sinister message informing them that ‘Evan Chan was murdered’ and that ‘Jeanine is the key’. Those who managed to figure out that clue – which involved a trip to Google – could then move on to the next phase of the game, and the next, and the next, until those who had proceeded far enough actually started to receive phone calls of their own. At home. In the middle of the night. All leading closer to the truth behind the murder of Evan Chan.

What those bemused players in 2001 didn’t realise, as they trawled for clues on the web and waited for late-night phone calls from fictional characters, was that they were witnessing the birth of the alternate reality game, or ARG – defined by technology news site CNET as ‘an obsession-inspiring genre that blends real-life treasure hunting, interactive storytelling, video games and online community’. The success of ‘The Beast’, both in terms of promoting a dreadful movie and in engaging players on a level never before seen in marketing, led to an avalanche of similar ARGs, to promote everything from ‘urban’ T-shirt brands to pulp spy novels.

But the level of round-the-clock commitment required by both players and marketers meant that most of the copycats vanished without trace, with only a handful – like Nokia’s brilliantly titled ‘Nokia Game’- registering as more than a passing blip on the cultural trend radar.

For a couple of years it looked as if ARGs were destined to join Letsbuyit.com and Barcode Battlers in the e-dustbin of neat ideas that never really caught on. But then two things happened. First came the broadband explosion, creating a vast army of people who were now spending hours online every day looking for something to do. And then, not long afterwards, Dan Brown’s book The Da Vinci Code shot to the top of the best-seller charts, introducing those very same people to the world of extreme puzzle solving. Highspeed Internet access, a horde of puzzle freaks – it was only a matter of time before ARGs were back with a vengeance.

But what Michael was describing as we sat in the Lab Bar was an ARG with a difference. This was an ARG where the only thing it was promoting was itself – no secret movie or mobile phone brand to be pushed: the puzzles themselves were to be the product. It was, by any measure, a bloody good idea, and with the marketing and distribution might of Firebox behind it, it was hard to see how it wouldn’t fly.

I ordered another rum and Coke and, dropping any pretence of aloof indifference, told Michael how cool his idea sounded. So cool, in fact, that I had a suggestion:

‘Why don’t you put a small section of a map on the back of each card? That way, when people have collected enough cards, they can piece them all together and follow the map to the prize.’ It seemed like a pretty obvious step to me.

‘That’s a good idea, ‘ he lied, pretending to write it down in his notebook.

With that, I left Emily to her flirting and promised to keep an eye on Michael and his puzzles, and maybe write something about them when he was ready to go public.

2.3

As it turned out, Michael and I ran into each other again a few months later, when he turned up at one of Emily’s parties, thrown for friends and fans of Cliterati.co.uk.

Noted in society for their host ’s exquisite liquor cabinet, Emily’s parties are generally considered to be both a great way to meet your fellow media types and the quickest and easiest way to get laid in north London. At the first one I’d been to, two porn stars showed up, along with early nineties Britpop icon Louise Wener, two magazine editors and a tiny woman dressed as a prostitute. Apparently the latter was actually a very famous burlesque dancer.

That same night I ‘d dragged along an old school mate of mine who had turned up with his very prim high school sweetheart. At the end of the night he ended up going home with his by now slightly less prim high school sweetheart and a very cute freelance journalist who was only supposed to be there to profile Emily for the Metro . The three of them slept together, in a variety of different configurations, for the next six months. Our other friends found the story unbelievable but it was all in a night’s work for Emily.

The party where I ran into Michael was a slightly less sordid affair – but only slightly. Emily had promised to introduce me to some interesting Internet entrepreneurs who were going to be in attendance and who might make good column fodder, so technically I was attending the party for ‘work’, which is easier said than done when the only available seating options in Emily’s living room included a sex swing and a space hopper with an enormous dildo attached.

Over bright green jelly shots containing God only knows what, I cornered Michael and begged him to tell me more about his idea. Forget shorthand and fake sheiks – plastic shot glasses full of alcoholic gelatine are the most important tools in the journalist’s arsenal.

‘ Oh, come on, at least tell me something, ‘ I pleaded. ‘I promise I won’t write about it until you’re ready. You’re one of the few people who was successful the first time round and is still launching a new company. You’d make a great story.’

Shot glasses and flattery.

My last memory of the evening is holding a plastic cup full to the brim with vodka while trying to remain focused on a conversation about vaginal casting with a stunning blonde girl, while Michael sat in a corner competing with Emily’s paramour du jour to see who could recite pi to the greatest number of digits. Michael won by a healthy margin, reaching about twenty before we all passed out.

But before that, thanks in part to the jelly shots, I had managed to extract a few snippets of information out of him: things were continuing apace with his new venture, they had a name for the company and had even decided how the treasure hunt portion of the game was going to work. What they’d decided – and this is brilliant – is that each card was going to have a small piece of map on the back which, when put together with other cards, would create a much bigger map which would in turn lead to a clue which would in turn lead to the treasure.

The cheeky bastard.

Not only was he better looking than me, wealthier and able to remember pi to twenty decimal places (I got as far as 3.14… ) but now he was going to make his fortune – again – and my brilliant map idea was going to help.

The bastard.

The utter bastard.

‘You utter bastard, ‘ I said ‘You owe me.’

‘Ha. Okay, what do you want?’

‘I’ll think of something.’

2.4

And so it was that I found myself, notepad in hand, standing in Michael’s stark white rented flat on Lavender Hill in Clapham; the first journalist to have ventured inside Perplex City.

I’d pitched the idea to my editor as a red-hot exclusive double-page feature about a company that was going out of its way to shun publicity. In reality, during the year and a bit since we’d first met, Michael and I had become really good friends and I’d made him promise that, as soon as he was ready to go public with Perplex City, I’d be his first call.

The reason for the secrecy of the location, which I admit provided an element of excitement to the article, suggesting I had Bob Woodward-esque access to this secretive new business, had a slightly more mundane basis in reality.

As he sat down to be interviewed in the flat’s single stark white bedroom, which had been converted into a makeshift conference room, Michael asked me for a favour: ‘Er… there’s just one thing. The landlord doesn’t know we’re running a business from the flat – we’ve told him there’s just two of us living here; so every time he comes round we have to hide all the computers and send all the staff away. You can’t tell anyone where we’re based or we’ll get kicked out.’

‘ Don’t worry, I’ll just say it’s somewhere in south London. Anyway, if I drew a map, you’d only steal it, you bastard.’

He laughed. As well he might.

Suddenly, from the other room came a shout. More of a yell, really.

‘They’ve found it!’

To this day I’ve no idea if the moment was a set-up for my benefit – to this day Michael swears it wasn’t – but at that exact point a staffer announced to the rest of the flat that one of the players had stumbled across the next phase of the game – an online newspaper called the Perplex City Sentinel (perplexcitysentinel.com).

Michael explained: a few days earlier his team had sent out clues which led smart players to the famous zebra crossing at Abbey Road. There, at a precise time, a character (played by Michael’s actress sister, Anna) handed over envelopes containing clues to the next phase of the game. Twenty or so people had turned up in the flesh while a couple of hundred more watched from around the world, via webcam. Evidently they had managed to piece together the clues contained in the envelope because the fan forums were suddenly abuzz with talk about the Perplex City Sentinel and theories on what lay behind its mysterious subscription-only wall. And, of course, what it all meant for the search for the cube.

One player had even pointed out that ’sentinel’ is another word for ‘guardian’ and was suggesting that the paper was involved. I laughed but did wonder for a moment whether I was in deeper than I thought. Surrounded by those white walls, with pictures of fictional people and maps of fictional places on the wall, it was almost impossible to know what was real and what was fiction. I was actually starting to get nervous, like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix . But in south London, in an illegal sub-let.

I got a few more good quotes from Michael about the game and then made my excuses and left, strangely relieved to be back in the gritty normality of south London’s muggers and ASBO kids.

As I walked to the station to catch my train back to reality, my mind was racing. Michael’s Perplex City game was exciting, for sure, and I genuinely thought it was going to be huge. But that wasn’t why I was suddenly feeling a surge of adrenalin strong enough to make my head spin. Ever since I’d started writing for the Guardian, I’d been meeting people with interesting ideas that could very possibly make them rich if market conditions were right, and I hadn’t cared. I’d seen it all before, the first time around. The promise, the hype, the bubble. It was all bullshit.

But standing in Perplex City HQ, seeing all those ultra-creative workers crafting a story that was already becoming an obsession among its players; hearing Michael’s enthusiasm when he talked about bringing the Internet together with other media and knowing that he was having a ball doing it – I knew I was seeing something different.

These weren’t Ben Cohens sitting in this stark, white flat; these were creative people and entrepreneurial people and technology people working side by side, building something that could genuinely become a phenomenon. And if Michael’s past performance was anything to go by, they were going to make a killing in the process.

I was feeling something I hadn’t felt for a while. And I was feeling it bad.

I was feeling jealous.

2.5

Of course, I ‘d like to believe that my article, in which I’d described Perplex City as ‘the puzzle game gearing up to be the interactive phenomenon of the year’, was entirely responsible for the success that the company had in the months that followed my visit. But I suspect it probably had more to do with the fact that Michael was offering prize money of £100, 000 – or $200, 000 – to whoever successfully followed the clues and found the mysterious Receda Cube. A cube which it was later revealed had been stolen from the very heart of Perplex City (a fictional place on a fictional planet) by person or persons unknown and hidden somewhere on earth.

What was clear, even in those early days, was that Michael was my kind of entrepreneur: someone who took every opportunity he could find to blow his own trumpet.

A few weeks after my article was published, Michael took me aside at a networking event and proudly showed me his new business card.

Another thing to know about dot com entrepreneurs is that they put in a huge amount of effort to get their business cards just so . In fact, if you’re looking for the modern equivalent of Patrick Bateman – the lead character in Bret Easton Ellis’ novel American Psycho – you’d do well to spend some time hanging around in dot com companies.

Michael ’s card was certainly very impressive. As is the dot com way, it was double-sided, in full colour, with company info on the front and a cool graphic on the back. On closer examination, the graphic turned out to be a scrap of newsprint containing a gushing review of Perplex City: ‘the puzzle game that is gearing up to become the interactive phenomenon of the year…’

He’d cut and pasted the words straight from my article. First the maps, now this. The cheeky bastard.

Chapter Three: “You can lead a leopard to dog milk…”…