Yearzero.nin.com

http://yearzero.nin.com/

^{* http://yearzero.nin.com has since been decommissioned and does not appear to have been preserved by the Internet Archive.}

Discovery

View of front page - Feb 25, 2007

Final front page view

The official subsection of the nin.com website pertaining to Year Zero.

Go to this thread on ETS for discussion of this website

Content

When the website went live, it contained a completely different image than the one displayed now, there was a vertical list of zeros. Over time the length of this list changed frequently, along with the number of zeros in each entry. This was the first indication that something strange was happening in regards to Year Zero.

Track Listing

Eventually, the listing stopped changing and 16 entries were left. Over the next week or so, three titles were revealed, one at a time: "The Beginning of the End", "God Given" and "Vessel". By this point, fans were already wildly speculating what would happen next.

On February 12, 2007, ETS user ianmatthews posted a track list he found from Soulseek. [1] Soon after, the remaining 13 titles were revealed on yearzero.nin.com. It is not known whether or not this was intentional or if it was simply a reaction to the track listing leak.

Malechite put together Yzminisiteanimation.gif[2] an animation of the image unfolding using the images saved at Symphony of Noise.

Then some distortion was added to the image, appearing next to the track "My Violent Heart" right before the song leaked, next to the track "Me, I'm Not" around the time that song was leaked and then the distortion appeared next to the track "In This Twilight" shortly before it leaked.

Survivalism Video

Static appeared on "Survivalism", shortly thereafter the "Survivalism" music video was leaked and then released on the Year Zero website.

The image for the video appeared and then changed to halo23_cover.jpg and a PDF of the lyrics to the song appeared.pdf here

Next to appear were links to a trailer.

Trailer

Road sign in the Year Zero trailer

"/0024 glitch" seen during the Year Zero trailer

The trailer released on yearzero.nin.com contains an image of The Presence.

The original uploads are no longer available, but trailer has been preserved in high and low resolutions on nindestruct.com. It can also be found hosted on YouTube and Vimeo, though the compression of the uploads may make locating the artifacts described below difficult to discover.

In the video, the camera quickly glances over a road sign witch reads "I AM TRYING TO BELIEVE". A "glitch" later in the video briefly shows the text "/0024", which quickly led fans to discover the page yearzero.nin.com/0024. According to the file name, the image on that page was found to be the cover for the Year Zero album.

The album art appeared on the page and eventually a link to a listen link.

Listen

The flash player on yearzero.nin.com.

Less than a day after the original Year Zero promo leak occurred, yearzero.nin.com was updated on April 4, 2007, with a listen to year zero link that launches a flash player streaming the entire album. (yearzero.nin.com archived on 2007.04.04 with working flash player.)

fuzz.flv When listening to the album in this player, occasionally the image would flicker and become fuzzy for a few seconds before returning to normal. Disorganized decompiled the flash file and found a file called fuzz.flv containing the various flickering images. So far, one image of a silhouetted figure standing has been found. It appears to look similar to the image of Trent on the Beside You In Time DVD cover. It is also present in the Temporary Internet Files Folder but resembles an zoomed in appearance of 'The Presence' from the Year Zero trailer.

Upon further tinkering with the fuzz.flv image, Several other images have been found. Two of which occur on the black bar banner occurring at the beginning and end of the short video file. They both appear to have lettering and/or a phrase written through the middle of the bar. Also a blue clip of the file showcases a darker human like figure, also could be interpreted as 'The Presence'.

Mr. Brightside Disorganized also found that, upon decompiling the flash file, the words "Mr. Brightside" appear in the track listing. Speculation suggests that this could have possibly been the name of the scrapped bonus track for the Japan release of Year Zero.

Multitrack Files

Multitrack copies of the songs "Survivalism", "The Beginning Of The End", "Vessel", "Me, I'm Not", "Capital G", "God Given" and "My Violent Heart" have been added to the page in Garageband format, and with links to torrents with the songs in raw files to be used in other applications so that fans could remix the song.

AIR Flag

An image of an AIR flag was added to the bottom of the page and linked to Art_Is_Resistance, then a resources link was added.

Wallpapers

Year Zero and themed wallpapers have been made available to download in various sizes as zip files.

Resources Link

http://yearzero.nin.com/resources/index.html

Parent Page: Yearzero.nin.com

Number: There is no known number for this page

Background Text: There is no known Banned media for this page

Discovery The link to the resources page eventually appeared on the Yearzero.nin.com page

Content The page design contains two columns

Press which is self explanatory
Experience which lists Open Source Resistance, ETS, and—You guessed it—NINWiki!

Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D

A Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D section was added prior to its release and contains information regarding formats, extra wallpapers and a link to remix.nin.com.

Hidden Images

The page uses an imagemap to conceal a great deal of hidden links which, when clicked on, display images presumably from the recording sessions for Year Zero.

There are links to 11 images: 03.jpeg, 07.jpeg, 10.jpeg, 12.jpeg, 14.jpeg, 19.jpeg, 22.jpeg, 25.jpeg, 28.jpeg, 31.jpeg, 39.jpeg.

The following link was found, but is not linked from the main page: albumcover.jpg. It appears to be the same as the image found at http://yearzero.nin.com/0024/.