Music Video Websites: Hotel 626 & The Wilderness Downtown

The presence of the internet has completely restructured the possibilities of creating a music video. Now one can exist and make choices within a simulation. It's basically playing a videogame for the length of one song.

My first experience with this concept was with a Doritos-sponsored video experience called Hotel 626. This website is no longer up and running, and it actually isn't a music video at all because it has nothing to do with music. But when I saw the music videos/websites I'll mention in this post, I always categorized Hotel 626 into the same genre of project.

Anyway, Hotel 626 was a website where you "check in" to a hotel online and stay the night there. Before you get past the first screen, the "wallpaper" ripples as a dimensional face screams through the screen. Oh, did I mention the hotel is haunted?

Some of the trials the participant had to overcome was singing a baby to sleep with a lullaby, finding out the pattern to escape the cell, taking a photograph of the scary monster in the pitch black room, picking the right hotel door to get away from the scary thing chasing you down the hallway, and finding the picture of yourself that was taken mysteriously when you didn't know it. In the end, you escape only when you listen to the instructions that you are given when you get a random phone call from the game! All the scary parts sound mundane when written down and described, but believe me, the thought process that went into making this game is awesome. The player never knows what they are expected to do to complete each level, so one just has to try and interact with what then can see. Before each level is a riddle, which is your only instruction.

Here's a video of what it looks like to play the game/website/experience looks like:

The scariest aspect of the whole experience was at midnight on the evening you played the game, you'd get another call saying that Hotel 626 hopes you enjoyed your stay at their establishment. The reason why this Doritos website was successful was all associated with breaking your expectations for the perimeters of the world of the game.

A year or so after this, Arcade Fire released a similar website/experience/music video called The Wilderness Downtown for its song, "We Used to Wait." The Canadian band partnered with Chris Milk and installed an experience only available with HTML5. This piece is a little more like an art-directed instantaneous movie starring you, the viewer. It requires you to type in the address of the home you grew up in. Instead of the screaming wallpaper face from Hotel 626, a flock of dark birds circle around your computer screen. Again, the project creators had to make a movie trailer for the website.

This website is still up and running so please check it out. The reason why it's genius is because the band gives you a completely personal experience bordering on and inspiring memory with a soundtrack made for you. They show you images of the house you grew up in as a person runs through empty, freshly damp streets as the sun sets behind them. 

As I watched the video, I realized the person in the gray hoodie is supposed to be me running through my past. And since the past is gone and can never happen again, huge trees burst through your yard and disrupt the experience as more black birds fly overhead. The multiple windows add an interesting choreography to where your eye travels around the screen as well. 

I think this is one of my favorite music videos of all time because it really proves the band knows the feeling behind the sounds and lyrics they invented. There is literally a nirvana in their presentation. They also use a video that corresponds directly with the inspiration for the album hinted at in the track titles: urban sprawl, the suburbs, and Tracy Kidder's Mountains Beyond Mountains. 

At the very end of the video, you write a letter to your past self in an attempt to "let go" of some unfinished business involving your old house. Is the fact that Arcade Fire almost forces a personal intervention too emotional for you? Well, first realize how much power you just gave a simple website/video over you.

The reason why someone could dislike these types of projects is that most of them ask for personal information about you. I'd be interested to know of any other music video/websites that are made in the same vein as these two projects.