Category: Reviews (Page 13 of 13)

The Art of the H3ist Wrap-up and Review

June 30, 2005 / Carie Ward

June 29, 2005 marked the Relaunch Event for Tatum Think as well as the finale for the Audi sponsored Alternate Reality Game The Art of the H3ist. Players gathered at The Viceroy in Santa Monica as well as on the web to watch the live event play out.

The beginning of the end started 36 hours in advance with one of the lead characters, Ian Yarbrough, breaking into his rival Virgil Tatumâ€™s house. While Ian found the incriminating evidence he was looking for, he also managed to get himself caught red-handed by Virgil and his two goons and was promptly captured.

The Daughters of Freya are Gonna Get Ya

June 10, 2005 / Jackie Kerr

Every once in a while, the staff of ARGN are approached by people wanting to share their talents and ideas with the ARG community. When Michael Betcherman, a co-creator of emailmystery.com approached us with an opportunity to experience the mystery of The Daughters of Freya, I jumped upon the chance to try something a little out of the ordinary.

ARGers, when not in the midst of a game, usually spend their time honing their puzzling skills by creating or playing puzzle trails and dunking their pens into the ink well of the internet to find some similar puzzle game. Rarely do they find the chance to indulge themselves in the â€œother sideâ€ of ARGs, the more literary, story and character driven half. Michael and his co-creator, David Diamond, have tapped the proverbial beer keg of immersive story greatness that allows even the most hardcore, plot-driven ARGers the opportunity to flex their brainpower on something other than vigenere or the latest Dan Brown novel.

Halo 2’s “I Love Bees” Alternate Reality Game

December 19, 2004 / Jonathan Prendergast

The story of I Love Bees proved to be slightly confusing at times, but the gist of it is this: Beekeeper Dana had a site which was attacked by some sort of virus; a countdown was placed on the site which spawned endless hours of speculation as to what the hell “System Peril Distributed Reflex” represented. Besides looking at the odd snippet of information through corrupted pictures and jarbled text, all the players could do was wait on tenterhooks until July 27th, on which “Network Throttling would erodeâ€¦”

Sure enough, come noon July 27th, ilovebees.com is updated. Someone was mad at Dana and posted pictures of her all over the site; Dana freaked out and decided to flee the country.

The next major plot advancement came August 10th, when “the medium has metastasized”. A lot of information was posted on the site- the most important being GPS Coordinates. 220 were posted in total, all of which pointed to locations the length and breadth of the United States.

On August 17th, to the dismay of some, the coordinates changed- now there were 210 in total. However, there were now specific times telling people when to be at a particular coordinate- which proved to quell a lot of confusion. The importance of being at the “axons” was further emphasized when Dana added to the excitement by implying on her blog that we really should get to them! All players could do was kill time, and many found the night of August 23 to be a sleepless one.

So what happened when the axons (pre-determined payphones in large cities) went hot?

SEN5241 (THX1138)

September 4, 2004 / Steve Peters

Roughly a month and a half after konamouse and many in the THX 1138 fan
community received the first emails from OMM, the SEN5241 (aka SubCity Central)
ARG has ended. OMM has fallen, all are free and ARG players have walked away
with another quality bit of entertainment under their belts.

For those of you who didn’t play along, Subcity Central was set in the world of
THX-1138, an early film by George Lucas. In the THX-1138 world, people live in
an oppressive, drug-controlled society. They aren’t allowed to think for
themselves, love or even have sex. They don’t even have names, but instead
SubjecteID’s like SEN5421. Players helped bring down OMM by sabotaging many of
the systems that kept the people under OMM’s thumb. The players produced
defective police robots, altered the community’s drugs and broke the hold OMM
held over the people. Without drug clouded minds and police to control them, the
people rose up against OMM and gained their freedom. Yay!

Category: Reviews (Page 13 of 13)

The Art of the H3ist Wrap-up and Review

The Daughters of Freya are Gonna Get Ya

Halo 2’s “I Love Bees” Alternate Reality Game

SEN5241 (THX1138)

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