Category: Announcements (Page 13 of 16)

ARG Parody ‘Seen Steve’ Takes Off

July 14, 2005 / Carie Ward

It’s not every day that an ARG that starts off by IM’ing hkdl turns out to be one of the most talked about, but “Seen Steve” has turned out to be just such a game.

Seen Steve is a brilliant parody of the ARG world. So far it has encompassed Acheron, Art of the Heist, BLARGS, The Beast, Chasing the Wish, The Flaming Heart, gAIMs, Gypsysoft, I Love Bees, Lockjaw, Our Colony, Perplex City, RedKore, and Seen James – just to name a few. As a bonus, it also has ferrets and pixies which are near and dear in everyone’s heart (or at least they should be).

Where’s Handy?

May 18, 2005 / Carie Ward

These days, you can take nothing for granted.

What seems to be a very well-researched feature article in the East Bay Express discussing 4orty 2wo Entertainment, I Love Bees, and what goes on behind the scenes in an ARG also seems to have its own secrets buried within it. The article, entitled The Buzzmakers, seems to indicate that Alex Handy (the article’s author) is missing. Clues to his disappearance have been hidden within the article, the paper edition of the weekly Oakland area East Bay Express, as well other real world mediums.

ARGN Adds Features, Staff

May 2, 2005 / Steve Peters

ARGN has turned an important corner, recently. For the past six months, the genre of Alternate Reality Gaming has continued to gain mainstream recognition, in no small part due to games like I Love Bees and Regenesis. As a result, traffic here and at affiliate sites like Unfiction has continued to grow swiftly, which is a good problem to have. The proliferation of new and ongoing ARGs, continued media exposure, and becoming widely accepted as a bona-fide news source has suddenly made it pretty obvious that we’re not just a little fan-site any more.

Ares Station Launches

March 3, 2005 / Steve Peters

If you’ve been looking for something to do while waiting for Perplex City to get going, your search may be over. An alert reader sent the following email to the ARGN tipline this morning:

Subject: 49276D20696E76697369626C652E

I walk through the plastic halls. I see you on your blue planet so far away. Your whispers, once a week bursts, tell me you think my home is your salvation.

Rejoice! Rejoice! You will use us, downtrodden miners and sterile scientists, as a stepping stone to the great beyond.

You don’t see us as people at all. You should be ashamed.

Just like her.

Orbital Colony? Something else? A little soon to tell for sure, but it looks like there are multiple websites/blogs from the year 2083 A.D. to tear apart in the meantime. We’ll keep you posted as things progress.

Discussion on Unfiction.

MSN’s New Search Engine Launches “Search Opera”

February 18, 2005 / Steve Peters

In a move that, upon further reflection, makes perfect sense, MSN has launched a stealth “search opera” to help promote their new search engine. A search opera, according to Sean Stewart (author behind The Beast and I Love Bees), is just another term for an Alternate Reality Game. In this instance, having a search opera to accompany a search engine launch seems to be a pretty good fit! Sean has summed it up this way:

“Essentially, a search opera is a story treated as a scavenger hunt and a jigsaw puzzle rolled into one. What’s particularly nice about the search opera is that for a decade now people have been looking for a way to use the internet as an artistic medium. The net wants to be interactive, and it wants to be social. A search opera allows a collective audience to have an artistic experience while searching and gossiping and decoding and speculating: in short, while doing the things that the net was really born to do.”

The MSN Search Opera (ARG) centers around a guy named Cy and his conspiracy website. Following the links on Cy’s site and clues garnered by entering specific keywords into the MSN search engine yields videos (some of which are pretty funny), more characters, their journals, and a story that will develop over upcoming weeks.

And yes, I admit that I’ve already downloaded and assembled a hypnodragon of my very own, which my daughter thinks is gleefully amazing.

Discussion on unfiction.

“I Love Bees” and Elan Lee to Receive 2005 Innovation Award

February 15, 2005 / Steve Peters

Inside word comes to us today that “I Love Bees” and lead designer Elan Lee will receive a 2005 Innovation Award from the International Game Developers Association, to be announced at the upcoming Game Developers Choice Awards in March. The Innovation award is a special creative/design award given to standouts in innovation every year. Previous games that have won this award include Counter-Strike, Rez and Black + White. As this is a largely console/PC focused organization, we think it’s great for a game like ILB to be recognized.

The award will be presented at the 5th Annual Game Developers Choice Awards on March 9, 2005 at a ceremony during the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. For a list of the other nominees, check out the IGDA website.

Congratulations go out from ARGN to Elan Lee and his ILB team, for a job well done and recognition of what a cool thing Alternate Reality Games are!