The Door

**The Door** is an interactive online Alternate Reality Game/Webseries created by Nicolas Sequeira which ran from November 25, 2019 to December 6, 2020. The series was heavily promoted on Reddit, leading to a negative reception by many viewers. This bad publicity led Sequeira to disown the project entirely, finally accepting ownership of it on November 19, 2021.

## Progression

The Door was teased with a short video, "Soon," on November 25, 2019. This was followed by a series of short videos with morse code, as well as a Holiday-themed video. The first episode of the series proper, "Door," premiered on January 5, 2020. At the same time, a website with supplemental material was created. In addition, a physical envelope containing critical game material was taped to a pole on Evans Avenue outside a window and door siding company. This envelope is considered lost.

Other aspects of the game involved physical mail drops sent to a select few recipients as well as a unique "Doorcode" created from scratch, and a supplemental short story in Sequeira's sci-fi anthology "Graffiti On the Walls Of Pierce Brosnan's Garage."

The game was heavily promoted by Sequeira on r/ARG, leading to widespread initial interest- however, at the same time the Ban Nicolas Sequeira hate movement was in full swing, which led to the ARG fans and the anti-Nicolas bigots realizing that Sequeira was behind the game, and the anti-Nicolas group perpetuated a lie that The Door was only a fake ARG made to advertise Nicolas Comics. Despite these malevolent rumors, Sequeira chose to continue production on the series and claimed that the creators of the ARG were two gay Scandinavian men living in Denver who had hired him as a "visual consultant" because they appreciated his aesthetic.

The Door ended on December 6, 2020, with a total of 50 installments, making it one of Sequeira's most ambitious project to date. This was followed by a complete edited version of the entire nattaive, posted on May 16, 2021.

In November 2021, Sequeira revealed that he had been behind The Door all along, revealing that The Door is being developed into a short-story collection as part of The Alternate State Sequence.

## Storyline

The series is set during an alternate timeline where Edmund Gerald Brown Jr. became the President of the United States and Mikhail Gorbachev never becomes Premier of the Soviet Union, which leads to a prolonged Cold War ending a nuclear scenario in 2001. On the night of the attack, an experimental underground bunker known as the Compound, in operation since 1977, is used to seal off anyone who can access it, while those above are left to fend for themselves.

Coworkers Michael Collins and Bailey Knoll both run for the Compound- however, at the last second, Michael seals the entrance off, leaving Knoll outside to die. After this, humanity is separated between the privileged residents of The Compound, whose lives are without adversity or obstacles, and the hardy survivors on the surface who despite the irradiation do their best to reclaim the land.

By 2002, a loose network of communication of established between radio operators calling themselves Correspondents. An anonymous participant in this network calling himself "Correspondent 74" discovers a strange door left standing near Washington, D.C. He enters it and is transported to our timeline, which he names Timeline 13. After this discovery, The Door is once again forgotten and becomes an urban legend among the surface-dwellers, who regard it as a hopeful fantasy.

In 2020, Bailey Knoll finds The Door and uses its magic to torment Collins with visual and auditory hallucinations. Collins, having assumed Knoll long dead, is driven to question his place as a resident of The Compound as well as his betrayal.

The Door is implied to be a universal constant which is indestructible and which existed prior to the apocalypse but was hidden inside a building. It functions in a similar manner to the portals the Meat Butcher uses to access our world from his dungeon, and also leads into a cryptic labyrinthine structure.

## Production

The series was shot on location at Sequeira's house as well as the surrounding area. Footage from several TV shows and movies were also implemented, including archival tapes from NASA and episodes of Night Gallery.

Each video makes heavy use of retrofuturistic analog technology, such as Knoll's narration being captured on a microcassette recorder as well as Collins undergoing a session with a robotic therapist represented visually by a TV scan. The series also features morse code, video filters, and outdated fonts such as Microsoft Symbol. The Door seen in the videos is the front door of Sequeira's house.