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What is Project Gateway??

September 17, 2004 / Steve Peters

A few mysterious websites have cropped up that are causing some ARG’ers to scratch their heads. Things seem rather game-like, but frankly it’s may just be a little early to be able to tell exactly what’s going on. We submit it here for your consideration (cue Rod Serling in the corner along with obligatory creepy music).

This site provides the trailhead, a literal gateway into a realm of clues and locked up cells. The page beckons: “CC32 Gateway – Insert Front Door Key To Continue,” and somehow this site has led to two others: Project Gateway and 32nd Notes. Beyond that, we really can’t tell you much, beyond the fact that a certain amount of caution is advised, due to every ingame site so far being hosted on a free webserver of some kind. As always, proceed at your own risk.

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In Ilovebees news, players continue to strive for the 777 connected axons mark, having succeeded in answering 728 of the 777 needed phonecalls to proceed to the next step in the game, whatever that holds in store. Notably, the game’s first non-U.S. phone has been revealed in London, enabling British “Beekeepers” to get involved with this live interaction for the first time. With only 49 phonecalls left to go, we should find out what the next chapter in the ilovebees saga is within the next few days.

In the meantime, ARGN has set up a repository for all of the audio files found so far. It’s a great way to get quickly caught up on the major plot of the game, and you can access it here.

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Ilovebees Suddenly Seeking 777

September 11, 2004 / Steve Peters

It’s been a trying week or so for the Ilovebees ARG. After having axons piled on top of more axons, the players are starting to feel a bit abused, and momentum seems to be waning. Although the folks behind the game are revealing some stellar content in the form of audio clips, the pacing overall is proving to be a challenge for even the most optimistic.

According to Dana’s latest blog entry, players are being encouraged to press on toward the 777 live axons mark. The problem is, the phones seem to be being answered less and less often, which is quite a contrast from two weeks ago when there were as many as 30-40 people at some phones. Sadly, at this rate, it may be weeks before we find out what happens when 777 axons go hot. Currently, we’re at 496 out of 777. That’s a lot of phones left to answer!

On the plus side, the story that’s being revealed continues to intrigue. A new snippet is released each time a codeset goes active, and players have assembled them into a narrative that reveals not only a confirmed tie-in with the Halo universe, but a tale of chatternet hackers, geek love, nefarious kidnappings and blackmail. ARGN has assembled a repository of the audio story so far, and will add more as it is revealed.

Finally, as a little off-topic diversion from the endless answering of phones, ARGN is sponsoring an Axon-Hunter Photoshop Contest. Only a couple days left to get your entries in.

Graphic Credit: jamesi

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!

This Week in ARG: Ilovebees on G4TechTV; Orbital Colony Trailer

August 29, 2004 / Steve Peters

The PMs-in-training over at Orbital Colony have released a trailer for their upcoming ARG. The quality is impressive, and seems to give us the promise of a very intriguing, well-done Alternate Reality Game.

Orbital Colony announced a launch in the Summer of 2004, but no firm date has been set, yet. So keep your eyes open, or better yet, subscribe to the ARGN Announce List (in the sidebar at right) to keep tabs on what’s going on.

In other news, Ilovebees and ARGN were both featured on a recent episode of Pulse on G4TechTV. This episode will be re-airing all week, but if you can’t catch it on TV, it’s been made available online.

VIDEO: Windows Media-HI|Windows Media-LO

ILoveBees Breaks Into the “Real World”

August 24, 2004 / Steve Peters

August 24, 2004. It all began at 6:07 am PDT. Payphones from coast to coast began to ring. A twelve-hour wave of carefully planned phone calls began to sweep the country, and Halo fans, Beekeepers, the Media and the just plain curious were there to try to intercept them.

This morning, we got to find out what was in store for those who were following the events of Dana and the rogue AI attacking her aunt’s website. While many were expecting Halo 2 demo disks, what they got instead was one of the largest, most complicated distributed interactions in ARG history. Hundreds of people around the country descended upon over 200 locales, working as a team to answer phone calls correctly, in order to unlock a series of audio clues.

While we don’t have the space here to go into the story itself (for that, check the links below), here’s how the whole thing worked: Players were presented with a web page that listed 30 blocks of seven GPS coordinates, which turned out to represent payphones around the country. Each location had a specific time attached, and each block of seven locations had a common password. As the phones started ringing at the exact corresponding time, players realized that they must respond correctly to the voice on the other end in order for something to happen. It was determined that players needed to provide the nickname for the AI that was calling them, plus the password listed for their location. If successful, the web-page immediately updated, indicating success. Two successful responses per group of seven then resulted in an audio file being unlocked. Players successfully unlocked 22 of 30 files the first day, with another chance to unlock the remaining ones every 24 hours. These audio files, when assembled, are revealing a fascinating story.

And this is only the beginning!

Forums and IRC channels broke all records today. The main chat room, #beekeepers, peaked at over 300 users at one point. In addition, the press is taking notice of what’s going on. Word is that G4TechTV’s Pulse will be airing a story about ilovebees this Friday, so stay tuned.

Here’s a video of one event in Georgia. (6.7 MB)

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Photo credits
Berkeley: Stitch
Burbank: MrBabyMan

This Week in ARGs: Flash Mobs of Beekeepers??

August 12, 2004 / Steve Peters

Busy week in the Alternate Reality Gaming world. Here’s a summary of what’s been going on:

Ilovebees-
Well, the ilovebees puppetmasters are nothing if not prompt. Once their countdown to metastasizing was complete, ilovebees.com updated at 9am Pacific on Tuesday the 10th, marking the beginning of Phase 3. The site now contained a lot of embedded HTML text, embedded text in images, some new creepy sounds and a list of 220 coordinates.

The text, when defragmented, continues to reveal more and more about the AI (Melissa) and her origins, in addition to captured conversation from the ship she was apparently installed on. It seems that now Melissa is trying to find a way to break out of her box and become “wide awake and physical.” What this means, nobody knows, but it seems she’s making progress.

The sound files reveal a changeling child, which seems to be her finding her voice and trying it out. Now it seems she’s determined to transmit something to 210 discreet locations in the U.S., [EDIT: Updated the link to stay current] and by the looks of the timer, it seems that this will occur on Tuesday, August 24th, at 6:07 am local time, when the timer indicates Melissa will become “wide awake and physical.”

The jury’s still out on what this all means. Players aren’t sure if this indicates that some real world event is going to happen all over the country, or if it’s just a puzzle of some kind that needs to be solved. Either way, you can bet countless ARG’ers will be showing up in the wee hours of the morning at the various locales, looking for geocaches or waiting for dancing robots in bee costumes. There’s no telling what might happen, so feel free to join in, and bring your camera! We’ll post the best pics here, if you send them in.

[Edit: In addition, we’ve created a toll-free hotline for those of you at the various locations to use to report your findings, should you not have immediate web access. Feel free to call (866) xxx-xxxx [EDIT 8/25: number now offline] to record your findings. We’ll forward your report to the unfiction forums right away.]

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Urban Hunt-
Meanwhile, the folks over at Urban Hunt have been advancing a very compelling story. Secret documents/maps from the failed Reality TV Show Dread House have turned up, so it seems it may not all be an urban myth after all. There’s definitely a secret here, and things are still just getting started.

What happened to the contestants and the crew? Did they just disappear, or did something even more sinister occur? And what do dreams have to do with all this?

Check out The Guide for this if you want to get up to speed, as it’s very well done.

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