Tag: i love bees (Page 3 of 5)

“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!

ARG-Parties Announced

January 31, 2005 / Steve Peters

One of the by-products of Alternate Reality Games is the communities that they create and foster, and the sometimes longlasting friendships that can result. Consequently, ARG fans have been busy recently setting up various player meets in the upcoming months. Witness another ARG-Fest-O-Con and now a Hivemeet that are being planned as a way for online players to get together to party and re-live some of the games’ fun in real life.

Following on the heels of successful ARG-Fests in Las Vegas, Orlando and Vancouver BC, players are currently organizing ARGFest NYC, which will take place on July 22-24, 2005 in New York City, and have created a wiki to help coordinate events, accomodations, etc. Discussion of plans and ideas for ARGFest NYC can be found in this thread on unfiction.

For those of you who gave your lives to chasing down Axons a few months back, some midwest Beekeepers are currently planning the first ever Ilovebees Hivemeet in Chicago on May 13-15, 2005. The website they’ve created will help organize events, accommodations and travel plans. In addition, folks are discussing Hivemeet Chicago plans in this unfiction thread.

These meets are player sponsored and organized, so keep in mind that there are no “official” events planned, although if history is any indication, you can expect some realworld ARG-ish fun to drop in on you in one form or another. Watch the respective websites for updated news and information on these events.

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?

Ilovebees-Inspired Artwork to Raise Money for Charity

December 9, 2004 / Steve Peters

Artist Charles Allen Harris has announced that he will donate 50% of sales on his prints, to Child’s Play, the Penny Arcade Led Gamer Charity. Notably, one of his prints was inspired by the recent Ilovebees ARG, entitled Melissa-The Operator.

So, if you’ve got a Beekeeper on your Christmas list, pick up a Melissa print and help a great charity at the same time. 🙂

Live Phone-in Chat with IloveBees Actors

November 9, 2004 / Steve Peters

The Alternate Reality Gaming Network will host a live call-in phone chat with some of the voice actors featured in the Ilovebees Alternate Reality game, hosted by the kind folks at AccuTalk. It will be open to callers both in the US and abroad, and will take place this Saturday, November 13th at 12:00 noon Pacific/3:00pm Eastern. On hand will be Kristen Rutherford (Durga/Melissa/Sleeping Princess) and more from the cast (stay tuned).

This phone chat will work very much like a call-in radio show, as callers will have a chance to talk directly to the actors, and ask whatever questions they like. Watch this unfiction thread for more details as they become available.

EDIT 11/10: more details…
If you’d like to participate, call (404) 920-6610, then enter the conference code 516230#. You’ll be prompted to state your name (or screen name in this case), then will be put on hold until the chat begins at noon.

By default, you’ll be in listen-only mode. If you’d like to ask a question or make a comment, press *1. This will put you in the queue, which will be gone through in order. We’ll move overseas callers to the front of the queue. When it’s your turn, you’ll be ‘voiced’ and able to talk.

EDIT 11/13:
The chat went well. For those of you who couldn’t make it, here is a recording for your listening pleasure:

ilbphonechat (7.47 MB)

Halo2 ILoveBees Game Ends With a Bang

November 6, 2004 / Steve Peters

November 4th brought the final chapter to the 16-week Alternate Reality Game that became known as I Love Bees. A promotional game for Bungie’s eagerly anticipated game Halo2, Ilovebees caught the attention of thousands of gamers and media alike over the past few months. The journey culminated on November 4th, with a live event in four cities attended by hundreds of players (San Francisco, New York, Chicago and Austin). At this event, referred to in-game as a Combat Training Exercise, players got an exclusive chance to play Halo2 before its release on November 9th, and received a commemorative DVD and Ilovebees lanyard. What’s more, the lucky players in San Francisco got a chance to meet some of the Ilovebees Puppetmasters.

Ilovebees was developed by a team headed by Elan Lee and Sean Stewart, who headed up the first real Alternate Reality Game, The Beast, in 2001. Since then, they teamed up to form 4orty2wo Entertainment, and began production of Ilovebees in February. Ilovebees, which launched on July 16th, told the story of an A.I. from the future named Melissa who crash landed on a website server here in 2004. Over the 16 weeks of the game, players completed a series of web-based puzzles and realworld challenges to reveal a compelling story that formed a prequel to Halo2, following its characters through the weeks leading up to the invasion of Earth by an evil race of aliens known as the Covenant. The story was revealed in over 6 hours of audio drama using some of the best voice talent and post-production in Hollywood.

Ilovebees broke new ground in its innovative use of real world distributed puzzles, stellar writing and sheer numbers of players. At it’s culmination, the ilovebees site received as many as 500,00 unique visitors per day, making it by far the most followed Alternate Reality Game to date.

A post-game chat is scheduled with the Ilovebees Puppetmasters on November 7th at 2:00 pm Pacific Standard Time. You can have a chance to ask questions and get the inside scoop on what went on behind the game by stopping by #apocalypso on irc.chat-solutions.org (browser based access).