- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
All of this info is found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haunted_Apiary
The Haunted Apiary is an Alternate Reality Game (ARG), related in some way to the first person shooter Halo 2. Although a lot is not yet known at this time (as is the nature of such events), it is believed to be the work of Microsoft and Bungie (the makers of Halo), as the release date for Halo 2 nears.
The first reports of the game began around July 16, 2004, when some members of the ARG community received jars of honey in the mail, in which the letters spelling out "ilovebees" were immersed. [1] (http://forums.unfiction.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=4619)
At around the same time, an advert for Halo 2 [2] (http://files.bungie.org/halo2_teaser-trailer.mov) shown at screenings of I, Robot (mostly at Loews Cineplex theatres) flashed a link to ilovebees.com, which is ostensibly a site related to beekeeping.
The site, however, was covered in content that did not pertain to bees at all, but was instead some form of gobbledy-blam!-. This link quickly spread amongst Halo fansites and ARG sites.
Shortly after the site was "attacked," The webmaster created a weblog [3] (http://ilovebees.blogspot.com/) stating that something had gone wrong, and the site itself was attacked. Later entries state that her attempts to fix it were in vain. The last update was made on July 23, 2004.
Upon loading the said site, a Javascript-based textfield opens over the site content, in which is says the following as of July 24, 2004:
HALT - MODULE CORE HEMORRHAGE
Control has been yielded to the
SYSTEM PERIL DISTRIBUTED REFLEX.
This medium is classified, and has a
STRONG INTRUSIVE INCLINATION.
In 3 days, network throttling will erode.
In 17 days this medium will metastasize.
COUNTDOWN TO WIDE AWAKE AND PHYSICAL:
Make your decisions accordingly.
It uses a Javascript file named countdowntochina.js and/or regulated site updates to count down the days until July 27, at which time the "network throttle will erode," and then again to August 10, when "the medium will metastasize." Although it is unclear what will happen on July 27, TeamXbox patrons believe it may be related to new audio or video content, and on August 10, the game may spread out to other sites. Nobody knows what the counter is counting down to, but it is believed to be something pertinent to Halo 2. It should also be noted July 27 is the beginning of Meltdown, Microsoft's yearly forum/conference on game development and its relations to DirectX, XNA, Windows, and Visual Studio.
A Slashdot patron pointed out in a post that the site was running off a minimum of nine IP addresses [4] (http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=115519&cid=978 3204). However this observation is incorrect. The Slashdot poster pointed out that ilovebees.net is running off a minimum of eight IP addresses. However ilovebees.net (http://www.ilovebees.net/) is merely a placeholder page. Interestingly enough, the whois report for both ilovebees.com[5] (http://betterwhois.com/bwhois.cgi?domain=ilovebees.com&x =0&y=0) and ilovebees.net[6] (http://betterwhois.com/bwhois.cgi?domain=ilovebees.net&x =0&y=0) shows that it was registered by the same person. A Netcraft query for ilovebees.com[7] (http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=ilovebees.com&p robe=1) shows that the site is hosted on a Windows 2000 apache server and that it is hosted by Rackspace (http://www.rackspace.com/).
The images on the site seem to have written text in the image binary, causing the images to appear corrupted. As of July 24, all of the images and their written text have been transcribed by the ARG community [8] (http://bees.netninja.com/wiki/index.php?title=Corrupted_Imag e_Text).
The text split apart and placed in <DIV> tags has also been logged, and put together as several pages, categorized as either Mayday Text (http://bees.netninja.com/wiki/index.php?title=Mayday_Text) or Computer Text (http://bees.netninja.com/wiki/index.php?title=Computer_Text) , in relation for the deeper meaning it alludes to.
It is believed by many in the Halo and ARG communities that this is a publicity stunt by Bungie, to build up hype for Halo 2, in a manner similar to the game The Beast which surrounded the movie A.I.. Indeed, as Microsoft were behind that first game, there has been speculation that Apiary is a sort of sequel.
Bungie have previously done something similar: the Cortana Letters seen on the Marathon Story Page [9] (http://marathon.bungie.org/story/cortana.html). However, the precise relation between the ilovebees site and the Halo story has yet to be discovered. There have even been connections in relation to Marathon [10]