archive for July, 2004

Urban Hunt

Thursday, July 22nd, 2004

The inestimable Yanka posted a link to a new upcoming reality TV show called Urban Hunt, that appears to be a kind of blend of real world challenges and online participation…or is it? Apply at the site to be one of the "Online Advisors," and the confirmation email you receive holds more than you may have bargained for, although it seems innocuous enough at first glance. Following the clues and web trail has led us to a total of five sites so far…can you help us find more? Join the discussion in the forum, or hit the chat room, #urbanhunt on irc.chat-solutions.org.

Halo 2 Loves Bees?

Thursday, July 22nd, 2004

As strange as it may sound, there could be a possible connection between the ILoveBees site and the upcoming release of Halo 2, a hotly anticipated game for the Xbox console platform that is due out in November. It appears that the developers made a deal with Loews Cinemas across the country to show a theatrical trailer for the game during the previews before certain movies. The trailer doesn't appear to contain any new game scenes or information, according to scattered posts on Xbox- and Halo-related discussion sites. However, there have been a few reports that the Xbox URL shown at the tail end of the trailer changes briefly from www.xbox.com to www.ilovebees.com! There are a few online versions of the theatrical trailer floating around, but unfortunately their quality leaves something to be desired. You can see that something is definitely happening with that URL though! Is there a connection? If you can substantiate or disprove the theory, we'd love to hear from you over in the Haunted Apiary forum!

The Haunted Apiary

Saturday, July 17th, 2004

ARGN operator Steve Peters received a strange package by FedEx yesterday, containing a plastic honey bear in which the sender had inserted some letters. Opening them up and performing a little anagrammatic wizardry led him to the I Love Bees website, which appears to be under some sort of crazy assault. Can you help Dana find out what's wrong with her aunt's website? Join the hunt in the new forum!

Orbital Colony

Saturday, July 17th, 2004

As a sort of joke, fireball posted about an odd Ebay auction in which the seller purported to be auctioning rights to an asteroid. Konamouse wondered if this might be a rabbit hole for the Training ARG, which has been in development since this Spring. A couple of days later, Caterpillar noticed that one of the bidders on the auction had an odd profile page. Decoding the graphic on that profile led players to the meta-site for the game, christened Orbital Colony, which may be due to launch soon or may have already launched! Keep an eye on this one….

The Manchurian Candidate

Saturday, July 17th, 2004

There's a remake of "The Manchurian Candidate" coming out soon, starring Denzel Washington. Alert reader Trallyus tipped us off via email to a companion game in which you use your cell phone to answer riddles and gain entries to a sweepstakes where you could win a hometown screening of the movie and/or a new Kyocera cellphone. It's billed as a "voice recognition game" so may not be quite an ARG, however…

Equally alert reader Individua spotted the name in the movie trailer of the evil corporation behind the brainwashing in the movie, "Manchurian Global." Turns out via Yahoo! or Google search, they have a website (conveniently located at the top of the hit list, along with sponsored ads for that search query term). The site, as Individua points out, is full of useless technobabble fluff, but it does have an interesting link to a private extranet. Anyone feel like cracking a login? :D

The Manchurian Game movie site has some quite nice flash on it, as well.

Side note on the Manchurian Global site: on the home page, the "contact" link at the bottom is attached to an email address, but on other pages it links to the nonexistent "contact.php" file. Let's see how quickly they fix that.