Two weeks ago, selected members of the UnFiction message boards were sent mysterious emails from someone calling themselves “The Composer”. The emails were quickly solved — each email contained part of a coded message — and the game was on. Over the course of eleven short days, players were led to a security site, interacted via Instant Messaging, and were introduced to the story of Renata Isle.
As it turns out, the mystery has been solved, for now. On an in-game site, players have learned that they were part of a pre-game activity for upcoming ARG “Renata Isle”. The explanation promises bigger and better things to come on the “17th of the second,” which is assumed to mean February 17th of this year. There is also a teaser page that provides some basic details for the upcoming game.
From reactions in the discussion thread, this pre-game was quite enjoyable to be a part of. We will check back in on this on the 17th and see what happens with “Renata Isle”.
ARGN has learned that Elan Lee of
The recent successes of
Just before 2005 died and rose phoenix-like into 2006, a little trailhead appeared on a blog, and
The saga of Michael Adams began when our hero sent some out-of-the-blue e-mails to various ARG players. Michael, who seems to have an intimate relationship with paranoia, had encrypted the message with Morse code, Vigenere, and base64. (All of that, just to essentially say, “Urgent! I need your help!”) A more recent communication was encrypted nine times over — It’s a good thing that there are so many online decoders out there.