Month: October 2007 (Page 1 of 3)

Why So Serious, Halloween Edition

October 30, 2007 / Michael Andersen

At the stroke of midnight (Eastern time, GMT -4) on Halloween, the newest chapter in 42 Entertainment‘s alternate reality game promoting the release of the movie “The Dark Knight” launched. Over the past few weeks, the website WhySoSerious.com depicted a slowly rotting Halloween pumpkin with a diminishing candle.

Just minutes ago, as the candle burnt out, the page changed to show 49 small pieces of paper on a worktable. Each piece links to a puzzle involving a US city. A note from the Joker says,

“Hey, clowns! Ready to do what you’re told? First, don’t start before daylight. With a police force this corrupt, it’s not safe to be out at night, and anyway, you won’t be able to see the things you want to find.

Follow all of my directions to the letter and send photos of what you find.

I’ll make it worth your while, I promise – for what that’s worth…

The campaign to promote the new Batman movie started in May with a handful of Joker playing cards discovered in a California comic book store, and led to a massive email campaign to reveal the new face of the Joker. Later in July, strange dollar bills were distributed at Comic-Con that led 140 lucky participants on a scavenger hunt throughout the city of San Diego. Now, it appears the scavenger hunt has expanded on a national scale as participants are encouraged to solve a series of puzzles and send in photographs.

Check back at ARGNet for updates as the story develops.

Click Here for the discussion at UnFiction.
Click Here for ARGNet columnist Geoff May’s wiki for the Dark Knight ARG.

How Was Your Weekend?

October 29, 2007 / Jonathan Waite

While the weekend represents quiet and solitude for many of you, alternate reality gaming does not stop for days of the week that begin with an S. We received a plethora of ARG tips, tidbits and updates through the past few days, and here are the highlights:

Lance Weiler, a recent guest on the ARG Netcast series, has written about Hope is Missing, the ARG that was created to promote the DVD release of his film Head Trauma. His article at The Workbook Project is chock full of details and statistics about the campaign, and is an excellent read for people finding themselves on either side of the Puppetmaster curtain.
This year marks the second time that the Trinity University’s Coates Library in San Antonio has run Blood on the Stacks, an alternate reality game that helps new students to get familiar with the school’s library. According to this entry at the SHU – Blogcause07 blog, “anecdotally the library and support staff reported feedback from students of feeling more familiar, less alien in the environment, the library was associated with fun and the staff were more approachable.” This appears to be yet another neat way that people are using ARGs to assist in a social environment.
Thanks to a press release we received, we know how survivors of a zombie-apocalypse will find each other — Last Day’s Journal. This is a project that began in 2005 at the hands of Superfreako Productions, a two-brother team that had the idea for a television show dedicated to the concept of a post-apocalyptic zombie-infested world.

Guinness Tipping Point ARG Update: I May Be Getting Wasted, But I Won’t Be Getting Rich

October 28, 2007 / Michael Andersen

A post on Spinning Around, a subsidiary of AMV BBDO, indicates that the game requires players to go to the Guinness website to enter codes to gradually unlock the video. The first of eleven unlock codes is already available, revealing a three second snippet from the commercial.

Checking the Game’s Terms of Service reveals that there will be weekly prizes offered starting on November 2nd and running until December 7th. Prizes include Guinness branded glass packs, mugs, pint aprons, pint oven gloves, luxury chocolate truffles, Pint bottle opener key rings, Toucan key rings, Toucan luggage tags, playing cards and egg cup sets for 175 lucky people each week. It also indicates the official name of the campaign is the “Guinness Tipping Point”.

The grand prize for completing all the puzzles is a solid gold domino, awarded randomly to a participant who registers and successfully completes all 11 clues. However, don’t get too excited — the contest portion of this alternate reality game is only open to mainland UK residents over the age of 18.

Click Here to enter your Tipping Point codes and register to win.
Click Here for previous coverage on the Guinness Tipping Point at ARGNet.
Click Here for the UnFiction discussion thread.

Guinness Campaign Might Not Get You Drunk, but That’s Not Stopping Me

October 25, 2007 / Michael Andersen

According to Adfreak, GUINNESSÂ®, with the help of the advertising agency AMV BBDO, will be launching a new alternate reality game. Described as a “kind of treasure hunt”, players will be scouring the net to be the first to find Guinness’ newest commercial by following a series of clues, codes, and puzzles. The agency warns, “don’t expect it to be easy. As you know, it just wouldn’t be Guinness if the reward didn’t involve a little waiting.”

The first video has already been posted on YouTube by MeestaRamon, the mayor of a village that will be throwing a little celebration. In the video, Mr. Juan Ramon promises an unforgettable adventure, noting “a grand treasure awaits the person who finds the path” while playing with a handful of dominos. It remains to be seen whether the “winner” of this alternate reality game will receive something more than the first look at Guinness’ new ad before it goes on television.

ExperienceCurve shares a letter from Mr. Ramon that suggests a closer look at the video might be in order.

Click Here to view the video.
Click Here for the Unfiction discussion thread.

Holy blue jumping spiders!

October 20, 2007 / Geoff May

What happens when you receive an email that looks like spam, smells like spam, and reads like spam, but isn’t flagged as spam? Why, you take it to the ARG community, of course! Starting the week of October 9th, several people began receiving strange emails from someone called “Jumping Spider”. The emails in and of themselves seemed very random and made no sense. They contained a portion of a story, gibberish text, and broken sentences. I received one of these emails, and were it not for the fact that it wasn’t selling a product, I may not have taken notice of it at all. But thankfully, others at the Unfiction forums reported receiving the same email.

The email’s subject read: “Zetria Atrian and the Sparrow-Clam“, and contained what looked to be the first portion of a short story about a girl named Zetria, who in a dreamlike setting, watched a sparrow land softly on a sandy shore and turn into a clam, with which she began a fairly philosophical conversation, before it burrowed away.

The latter part of the email contains inconveniently cut lines of text that appears to be snipped from a chat session. And, amongst the narrative and the disjointed text, the email contains strings of random characters. It was quickly determined that the not-so-random characters are encoded in ROT-17 (see here for a brief explanation of ROT coding) and, when decoded, revealed what can only be described as computer commands, such as MAILSTART, FILELOAD, TRANSFERERROR, COREDUMP, and so on . It appears that whoever this “Jumping Spider” is, the emails are being created by some form of software, sending out portions of various texts.

Most bogglingly, however, is a code that’s appearing in each email, containing 12 characters – 3 sets of one number between 0 and 3, and three letters.

It’s Coming…It’s Coming…It’s Here! Ditch Witch Releases the Zahn

October 17, 2007 / Michael Andersen

For the last month, we knew it was coming. But until yesterday, we didn’t know exactly what “it” was. A series of Google Advertisements led to Itscoming.us, a website depicting a shed stranded in the middle of a moonlit field. Scattered throughout the eerily ominous environment were numerous clues hinting at what “it” was…but now, the truth is revealed. “It” is the newly released Zahn series of trenchers by Ditch Witch.

For those of you who, like myself, thought a trencher was only good for making authentic sandwiches, let me clarify. A trencher is a piece of heavy-duty construction machinery that digs trenches. And Ditch Witch, the Oklahoma-based industry leader in underground construction equipment, opted to launch their new line of trenchers virally. Targeted advertisements directed towards people searching for construction equipment ostensibly stumbled across the teaser page and hunted through a haunting environment in search of blueprint fragments to the new product as well as audio, video, and written clues periodically updated. The clues alluded to something hidden within the rickety shed in the middle of the screen…something powerful and awe-inspiring.

It remains to be seen whether Ditch Witch’s campaign succeeded in attracting the audience it desired. But in a market saturated with media and entertainment companies and large corporations attempting to reach as many people as possible, it’s refreshing to find a company using viral strategies to target a narrow audience.

Click Here to find a Ditch Witch dealer near you, with affordable financing available.