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Something about the way that his blog posts went way back made me wonder at the time if we'd been expected to discover Adam's blog a lot earlier. Had we been? (how, other than Pixie's not-exactly-Sequence-Breaking tactics?)
And if so, how might his development have been different if we had been speaking with him sooner? (Would we have given input into his name? His adoption of his cat? etc.)

Honestly, if I wasn't so scared of breaking stuff, I'd probably go back to the search and finish the domain sweep. That would get us Adam just after the 3... But then... Newbie ARG player, didn't had the courage to actually do it.
Next time Pixel, next time...

No, you discovered Adam right when you were supposed to. We deliberately locked off the sites that you weren't supposed to get access to yet, with only a minor blip that happened with Fictional Threat. That's why, despite your suspicions, you only actually broke sequence once.

I am pretty sure we avoided locking the blogs though. Most of them were updated in real time to maintain realism in case you did stumble upon them early. We fully acknowledged that the ezblog.co domain would be a pretty obvious hint once you noticed the pattern, so finding the blogs by sweeping it was a legitimate, if meta strategy.

Most of the blogs actually got found later than we originally scheduled them to be. We were still working out different puzzles through which to give them to you (since you weren't thrilled with how Mr. A just handed you Don Quixote's Twitter). We couldn't plan for exactly when a puzzle would get solved, and we didn't want to suddenly overload you with content. As a result, most of the blogs accrued quite the backlog by the time they were discovered. This naturally meant that the interactivity started later in their respective storylines.

Responding to comments and allowing them to influence the story was handled case by case, so it's hard to say just how much would have been different.

Val Reznitskaya wrote:I am pretty sure we avoided locking the blogs though. Most of them were updated in real time to maintain realism in case you did stumble upon them early. We fully acknowledged that the ezblog.co domain would be a pretty obvious hint once you noticed the pattern, so finding the blogs by sweeping it was a legitimate, if meta strategy.

This is mostly true once the game started (they were locked before things actually started, although they were updated before then). However, Adam's blog remained locked; I remember because I did a last-minute complete sweep to edit it before it went live, and I did it because I remembered all the passwords off the top of my head to get to edit it (and, also, it was my job).

Most of the blogs actually got found later than we originally scheduled them to be. We were still working out different puzzles through which to give them to you (since you weren't thrilled with how Mr. A just handed you Don Quixote's Twitter). We couldn't plan for exactly when a puzzle would get solved, and we didn't want to suddenly overload you with content. As a result, most of the blogs accrued quite the backlog by the time they were discovered. This naturally meant that the interactivity started later in their respective storylines.

This is definitely true. When you did finally do a sweep of ezblog and found the other unlocked characters, you guys were congratulating yourselves on Sequence Breaking while we were all going "It's about time!"

EDIT: Oh, and I went in to make sure Adam was talking about Italian beef sandwiches, because I *loved* those things when I visited Chicago, and the others thought it was an appropriate thing for him to eat. Also, I think the others thought my rhapsodic description of them was funny.

No, you found him exactly when you were supposed to. Rick pretty much already covered everything, and we developed the backlog of blog posts to give it a sense of realism of having been lived in. I know I liked the idea of being able to trace his actions back to times before interacting with any players, so I was alright with the backlog.