Wonderful article on Lobby Ludd

One actor, moving in secret from town to town. Clues printed in a daily newspaper, letting people know where he would be. A substantial prize for whoever located him; hundreds and then thousands of readers following his exploits and trying each day to find him. Special trains from Victoria running to the seaside towns where he was due to appear! Fifty thousand people crowding into Richmond Park in a single afternoon, when his predicted route took him through!

The fugitive was “Lobby Ludd”, and his role was to drum up readership for the Westminster Gazette. Many thousands of players hunted him (and the spin-off Mrs Lobby Ludd), for many, many weeks, in surely one of the biggest pervasive games ever. The year was 1927.

The Lobby Ludd phenomenon is something we’ve been vaguely aware of for a while—it’s certainly one of the most remarkable precursors of the pervasive games movement—but I had no idea it was so huge until I stumbled across this astonishingly exhaustive article. Ten pages, complete with a recording of the special Lobby Ludd song, “sold as sheet music through the Gazette’s pages, and scored for a ukulele accompaniment”!

And while we’re boggling at pervasive games of the past, see also this article by the same writer, Paul Slade, on a 1904 Weekly Dispatch treasure-hunt that sent players digging up gardens across the UK—and other similar hunts, including a proto-ARG where the clues were concealed in a detective story!

“Before he could secure his prize, Randall had to narrow down the possible cities to Newcastle and Carlisle, rule out Carlisle by deducing that Tabritz’ foreign pronunciation of the city’s “Citadel” station could be mistaken for “the hotel”, find a district of Newcastle that sounded a bit like “Edward Green” and realise that the serial number Meggs had overheard must be attached to a lamp post. He then had to go to the Newcastle suburb of Jesmond Dene, find post number 6594, work out where the tube was buried in relation to that post, return to the site after midnight and – finally – dig it up.”