- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
Well here is the whole article:
Spot On: The Halo 2 hype hoax
The "ilovebees.com" URL at end of Halo 2 trailer sparks August 24 release rumors; in fact, it's a complex combination of alternate reality game, story spoiler, and sales pitch.
See it » Last week, the Halo 2 trailer unspooled in movie theaters across the country. Besides eliciting loud cheers from gamers, the trailer also launched one of the more baffling viral marketing campaigns in years.
The head-scratching began when observant gamers noticed that when the Xbox logo appeared at the end of the trailer, the xbox.com URL at the bottom of the screen was briefly replaced with "www.ilovebees.com." After double-checking someone hadn't laced their popcorn with mescaline, those who noticed the switch went home and looked up the URL.
What they found appeared to be a laughably amateur site for a Napa, CA bee farm called "Margaret's Honey." But besides offering some unappetizing recipes and nauseating copy about how honeybees "make life sweet," the site appears to have been the victim of a bizarre hacker attack. After a few seconds, a black screen appears with the following copy: "HALT - MODULE CORE HEMORRHAGE. Control has been yielded to the SYSTEM PERIL DISTRIBUTED REFLEX. This medium is classified, and has a STRONG INTRUSIVE INCLINATION."
Below that is a countdown, which initially said "in [variable] days, network throttling will erode" before changing to "PHASE 1 COMPLETE: Network throttling has eroded" on July 27. After that is a countdown that ends on August 10 which read, "In [variable] days this medium will metastasize." This is followed by the words "COUNTDOWN TO WIDE AWAKE AND PHYSICAL," beneath which is nestled a countdown clock that ends August 24. The section ends with the ominous words, "Make your decisions accordingly."
The countdown clock's termination date has caused many to speculate that Halo 2 will ship on August 24, two months before its scheduled November 9 release. Other observers concluded www.ilovebees.com is a marketing scam using a bizarre approach to spark word-of-mouth and get free press (like, say, a news article on a top gaming Web site).
ARGs
While the latter group is essentially right, the www.ilovebees.com hoax is more complex that recent viral campaigns like Burger King's subservientchicken.com. It hops on the trend known as the alternate reality game (ARG), where a story is told via a series of fake Web sites laden with clues that readers can use to solve the story's central mystery.
Companies have been using ARGs as marketing tools for years. Since it is relatively cheap and sparks the sort of edgy buzz that companies crave, the technique has been used to hype various films, including Galaxy Quest and, most famously, The Blair Witch Project.
A more complex PR-ARG was implemented for Steven Spielberg's A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, in 2001. Much like Majestic, Electronic Arts' ambitious but failed "real-world" mystery, the A.I. ARG was interactive having players uncover passwords to "private" blogs and even sending them e-mails and phone calls.
Alternate reality games have also been used to hype video games--by none other than Halo 2's developer, Bungie Software. First came the infamous Marathon Gold hoax e-mail in 1998, which the company downplayed as a practical joke. Then there were the "Cortana Letters," a series of oddly worded e-mails that started going out in 1999, purportedly from the AI named Cortana that would eventually help the Master Chief on Halo's titular ringworld. However, the wording of the e-mails sounded a lot more like Durandal, the crazed AI from the classic Marathon series.
THE CLUES
So what is Bungie's game this time around? The central mystery of the ilovebees.com ARG is who--or what--has hacked the Web site, which was allegedly created by its proprietor's niece, Dana. A link was present on the ilovebees.com site to Dana's blogspot, which she talks about her upcoming trip to China and expresses befuddlement on what happened to ilovebees.com, including a mini-almanac about the significance of August 24.
That all changed on July 27, when the site got more "hacked." Besides displaying more corrupted images and jacked coding, it also now contains a series of disturbing messages to Dana from the author of a lengthy story about a "Queen" and a "Widow." Far from being a writer of atrocious fiction, the author appears to be a stalker. In a series of images that randomly appear on the site, the stalker answers questions presumably asked by Dana, who is pictured looking increasingly worried in a series of webcam shots. Little wonder then that her next blog entry is titled "emergency exit," and reads: "It saw me. It knows me now — seen and skinned. I'm sorry. I'm out."
So should we be worried that a young woman named Dana has had to flee the clutches of a maniac? Probably not, since she almost certainly doesn't exist. While a female voicemail message from "Dana" answered the contact number for the ilovebees.com Web site, the contact address is a rental mailbox in a former leather-fetish shop in San Francisco's Castro district. Furthermore, there is no phone listing for a Margaret's Honey in Napa, CA or its supposed proprietor, Margaret Efendi. The only things that appear to be real are the comments on Dana's blog, many of which warn that the whole ilovebees.com thing is a marketing ploy.
Double-click the video window for a full-screen view.THE HALO 2 CONNECTION
What does Microsoft have to say about ilovebees.com? Even though the company officially has nothing to do with the Web site, they refused to even comment on its existence. And, while interesting, the whole affair will raise the same question in many minds: "What the hell does it have to do with Halo 2?"
At first, the connection was only the brief flash on the Halo 2 trailer and the fact the contact e-mail for Margaret's Honey--ladybee777@hotmail.com--contained the number "7" which the staff of Bungie historically have a predilection for hiding in their games (343 Guilty Spark in Halo, etc.). Also of note is that the August 24 date is 77 days before November 9, the day Halo 2 is scheduled to be released.
However, since the "network throttling has eroded" message appeared on ilovebees.com--interestingly, on the same day the Microsoft Meltdown developer conference started--the site's connection to Halo 2 has become much more obvious. [WARNING: potential spoilers ahead]