Get LOST online this Summer

During the promotion for Stanley Kubrick & Stephen Spielberg's film AI, there was this wonderfully bizarre, byzantine website set up in conjunction with the movie -- a fictional tech company set within the narrative of the movie, but it had a harrowing murder mystery buried in its code, in its hidden pages, and in the e-mails and phone numbers you could call.

Really, the whole thing was better than the movie itself. Oh well.

At any rate, shortly following that, there was a multimedia game that surfaced shortly thereafter named Majestic which led users down a similar path: Using faxes, e-mails, message boards, and so forth, gamers were led into a world of intrigue, sabotague, and terrorism.

Then September 11th happened. And the highly fictional world of Majestic lost its entertainment value real quick.

Again, oh well.

Now, though, in a Summer stocked with reruns, new shows not even good enough to be midseason replacements, and both the Red Sox and Yankees looking at the strange backside of the Baltimore Orioles, there's hope. Made particularly in mind for fans of this year's smash TV series Lost, there's the Oceanic Airlines website, the fictional carrier whose flight 815 was lost en route from Sydney to Los Angeles. It's an impressive, creative addendum to the series itself, perfectly timed (and perhaps evolving) over these bleak Summer months.

Check it out. It's good. At least on par with AI -- Certainly better than Eyes Wide Shut.