Month: July 2004 (Page 1 of 2)

Ilovebees: The Beast is Back?

July 28, 2004 / Steve Peters

What began as a mysterious Fedex package of honey, has become one of the most intriguing and highly anticipated (for some) events on the ‘net in quite a while. At first, when ARGN received the honey (filled with letters that spelled I LOVE BEES, leading to ilovebees.com) a little over a week ago, we thought it was a new grassroots ARG starting up, but when it was discovered that the ilovebees.com address made an appearance in the recent Halo 2 trailer, we realized this may be much bigger than originally anticipated.

We were right. Since the trailer hit the web on Friday, the entire cyberscape is abuzz, trying to figure out what’s going on. The story has been picked up on computer gaming sites such as IGN, GameSpot, and even Slashdot. Thousands of posts on innumerable boards are clamoring to figure out what is going on.

What is confounding some is exciting others who recognize this as a new Alternate Reality Game. Those in the know are even proclaiming this to be the followup to the ARG that started it all: The Beast, which was a promotional game for Spielberg’s film A.I. back in 2001. The Beast spawned Cloudmakers, an online smart mob of over 7000 who rabidly followed, solved, and obsessed over who killed Evan Chan. The Beast was a viral promotion like no other, and was an amazing event for those who were involved.

So, what is going on here with ilovebees.com? How does it relate to the Halo 2 universe?? Well, ilovebees.com is an amateurish website for Margaret’s Honey that’s being hacked by someone…..or something. Margaret’s niece, Dana, is the webmaster, and the site points to her blog, where she is asking for help dealing with the virus or whatever it is that is screwing up her aunt’s site. Players have emailed her, and Dana has actually replied to some players personally, thanking them for their advice. Upon closer examination, it was discovered that the various images on the site were corrupted with text phrases, which when assembled correctly formed a rather bizarre narrative about a Queen and a Widow.

On July 27th, one of the mysterious countdowns on the site expired, resulting in an update with more hacking goodness, and scaring the crap out of Dana. It seems whatever is taking over her aunt’s site is now actually threatening her.

So, what does Halo 2 have to do with all of this? Well, a great Story So Far explains things pretty well, even though it is a lot of speculation at this point. [EDIT: The Guide is also a great place to start, as it’s a chronological narrative of what’s been going on, and is kept very up to date.]

The ARG community has done an absolutely amazing job so far, organizing information and using tools that were unavailable just a few years ago to create an information and dissemination system the likes of which have never been seen before. If they’re right, this is just the beginning of what is sure to be an amazing ride. Stay tuned.

Here are some links to get you on your way:

QuickStart
I Love Bees Guide
I Love Bees Wiki Guide
I Love Bees Trail
Bee Quicklinks
Moderated Blog

Here are some forums discussing I Love Bees:
Unfiction
TeamXBox
Bungie.net

IRC Chat:
#ilovebees

Ilovebees.com Link to Halo 2 Release Confirmed

July 23, 2004 / Steve Peters

It looks like ilovebees.com (aka SPiDeR) is definitely tied in with the upcoming Halo 2 release for XBox. Check out the trailer for the game being shown in theaters around the US:
Super Hi-Rez version (64mb) | Regular version

Watch the end. It’s there. So, we know there’s something major going on here, and know that there’s a countdown of sorts in progress. Watch for something big within a few days. With Microsoft and Bungie behind this, who knows how deep this rabbithole will go!

Discussion:
Unfiction Forums
Bungie.net

Urban Hunt: It’s not what you Think

July 22, 2004 / Steve Peters

Major find by Yanka on unfiction. Seems there’s a new reality TV show in pre-production entitled Urban Hunt. According to the website (www.urbanhunt.com), Urban Hunt will center around a group of contestants that will criss-cross the United States in pursuit of a cash prize of up to $500,000. Bonus Missions will include the use of a team of ‘online advisors’ comprised of home viewers, who will help contestants’ missions.

Also on the site, you can apply to become a contestant and/or an online advisor. Sounds like fun. A cool urban scavenger hunt/online reality show……..

…..or is it?

If you apply to be an online advisor, you receive an autoresponse confirming the receipt of your application. Interestingly enough, though, there seems to be a puzzle hidden in the message. Is it a test to see if you can pass muster? Or is it something else?

We won’t ruin it for you, but this is definitely some sort of ARG-like rabbithole. The puzzle leads to more sites which reveal a dark secret of a reality show gone very, very wrong. This isn’t a reality show, it’s a game. And it looks like they’ve even pulled the wool over on some media outlets.

Props go out to Yanka for finding this.

Busy week in the ARG world. When it rains, it pours.

Trailhead: Urban Hunt
Discussion: Unfiction

This Is Not An ARG: A Labyrinth Tutorial

July 20, 2004 / Krystyn Wells

Recently, many players were alerted to a series of puzzles that were hidden in plain sight – puzzles that ultimately revealed a shiny new tool called Labyrinth. This tidy, no-nonsense program is maintained, designed, and implemented by the Karetao group.

Although the Labyrinth tool itself is straightforward and organizationally versatile, we thought we’d provide a couple of short tutorials for you. It seemed only natural to approach the Labyrinth launch puzzle itself, and use it as a means to display some of the basic features of the program.

Let’s get started, shall we?

We have a trailhead, found in a known puppetmaster’s personal website. The indication here, in a comment code, turns out to be a pointer to a sub-directory on the site named ‘thisisnotanarg.’ So, we’ll call it that!

We open the Labyrinth application, and use the project properties to set the name of our mini-puzzle: â€˜This Is Not An ARGâ€™.

Since this does not appear to be a story-based game, our plot elements arenâ€™t going to be characters and locations; theyâ€™re going to be the individual pages we come across. Later on, it becomes apparent to us that the pages lead to one another, so for purposes of clarity with this tutorial, we’ll use the term ‘stage.’ We create a new element for the first stage.

The element is created and opened for us automatically.

But wait, there’s more!

Two More ARG Leads

July 16, 2004 / Steve Peters

Holy crap, what a busy day it’s been! First, we find orbitalcolony, then along comes a Fedex package leading to ilovebees.com with its mysteryious AI virus. Now we have two more good solid ARG leads to add for your investigation.

First comes a tip from the trailer for the upcoming remake of The Manchurian Candidate. Seems the evil company portrayed in the film has an online presence: www.manchurianglobal.com. What’s interesting about this (very well done) corporate site is that it has a password protected Limited Partners Extranet. In addition, there’s a Voice Recognition Game which may provide some fun, and a Kyocera phone, if you’re lucky.

Finally, Konamouse at unfiction alerted us to www.sen5241.net, which very well looks like it may be a tie-in to the upcoming DVD release of the classic George Lucas film THX-1138.

Well, that’s about it for one day. Happy hunting!

A Honey of a Rabbithole

July 16, 2004 / Steve Peters

ARGN got a very odd Fedex package just now. It was from Margaret’s Honey, ostensibly in San Francisco, and contained the honey-filled bear to the left.

Lo and behold, in the honey were 9 cutout alphabet letters. I’ve heard of alphabet soup, but alphabet honey?? Ahem….Anyway, the letters in question were: o-i-v-e-e-s-b-l-e. Anagramming the letters gives us, among other things, I LOVE BEES.

So……..www.ilovebees.com. Strange way to start an ARG, but that’s what it looks like. Things are not what they appear to be at ilovebees.com.

Stealth launch. I love it. 🙂

Two rabbitholes in one day……….weird.

[EDIT: We’ve dubbed this game SPiDeR for now (System Peril Distributed Reflex from the text on the site). A lot better than calling the game I Love Bees. Also, it should be noted that there are indications that this game may be part of another current game, but we don’t have enough information yet. We shall see.]