AlliedChemical started as a joke, a funny way to answer the telephone. But it took on a life of its own as my work led me into the internet. In 1996 I was working at Twin/Tone and consulting for Liquid Audio when we were putting together the idea of what a download store would look like. I started rambling about my fake chemical company; within an hour I had permission to peruse it. The best way to understand this site is just to go to it: www.alliedchemical.com Please know that the site hasn’t been touched since 2000, so it’s a bit of a time capsule. That said, it still gets around 2000 visitors a day. The idea was to make a parody site that was scarily dead on, that drew people to the music downloads. At the time downloads were a very novel idea and not a lot of people had interest so humor helped to bring them in. I was the designer and co-writer of the Allied Chemical site.
The site got a big following and was written up in magazines all over the US and Europe. It was even called “one of the funniest sites on the Internet” by Yahoo Internet Life magazine. The site also caused chaos with people looking for an actual Allied Chemical; we fooled people like Norad, NASA, the Government of Taiwan, some very stupid would-be terrorists, and several Dunn & Bradstreeet analysts. Most surprisingly, it got me sued for twenty five million dollars. Not by an Allied Chemical company, but rather someone who was suing because of munitions work done during World War II. Seriously. I really did get sued; you’d think the fact that our Allied Chemical’s number one product was a kosher hamspread would sort of make it obvious that it was a joke…