Halo 2 Website Puzzle Confounds 362
redune45 writes "The Halo 2 Theatrical trailer ends with the normal Xbox logo, but it also briefly replaces xbox.com with ilovebees.com.
Going to ilovebees.com it appears that the site has been 'hacked', adding to the mystery. The 'owner' of the site set up a separate blog with a post talking about the error. There is a huge thread on the Bungie.net forums on the same issue. The WHOIS information for this site shows that it was first registered on June 14, 2004. But no obvious clues other than that are available. What is going on here?" There's at least one Wiki set up to gather clues. We also mentioned this in an earlier Halo story.
re-inactment of a simpson episode (Score:5, Interesting)
Curiouser, and curiouser (Score:1, Interesting)
Not the first time for Bungie: Cortana Letters (Score:5, Interesting)
The Cortana letters preceeded Halo by several years, originating on Newsgroups and touching on some of the game lore of Marathon.
Re:They're just trying to create a buzz (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to take BART to school in San Francisco and one day in the stations there appeared these generic looking posters of happy family scenes and such with the words 'The Visitors are our friends' written on them. No other information was anywhere on the posters. Nobody knew what they were about but it got everyone talking. Then about a week later there was suddenly big red spray painted V's on all the posters. It was pretty strange at the time and I didn't know what it was about until the series came out about 6 months later. It got me to watch it.
did anybody take a look at the source to page yet? (Score:2, Interesting)
i did the bolding... it's got hoax written all over it, not to mention throttling as in the main page's black overlay.
AI Movie... (Score:1, Interesting)
I called... (Score:2, Interesting)
415-248-2617 - Sounds like a hot chick. =D
Re:Obviously a stunt (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:They're just trying to create a buzz (Score:4, Interesting)
Some more info here [wikipedia.org] regarding this whole stunt. I wonder about blogspot's policies regarding the use of their services as part of a hoax/advertisement campaign...
Suckers (Score:5, Interesting)
If you use WHOIS to look up the domain registration for ilovebees.com it has the following information:
Margaret Effendi (ladybee777@hotmail.com) 2370 Market Street #510 San Francisco CA 94114-1575 Phone: (415) 248-2617
Calling the phone gets you a voicemail "Hi, this is Dana, please leave a message." but the mailbox is full. From this I would assume the address also belongs to Dana.
--- The domain name ilovebees.com was registered on June 14, 2004, the same day as the first post in Dana's blog. The domain is registered until June 14, 2009.
However, the tags tell another story.
Before the closing
However, in the piece of HTML inserted after the final
Would a real defacement have taken the time to begin their class names with "dana_" as in the rest of the document?
Probably not.
This, combined with the domain registration taking place the same day as the first post in Dana's blog, leads me to the conclusion that the whole thing is a set-up.
However, the authors of this elaborate set-up (as in the movie The Game) have left those of us that are smart enough to figure out that this is bullshit a little easter egg:
<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="honey, bees, Margaret, small busines, beekeeping,
hives, retail, market, Operator, bug, buggy, virus, infestation, WTF is
going on with this damn thing, parasite, strong intrusive inclination, medium,
messages, shipwreck, network throttling, SOS, hoax, game, bee hoax, bee game,
survivor, survive, evade, resist, escape, a little help would be appreciated,
thanks and tip your waitress, sleep, is, good, install, reinstall,
re-reinstall, re-re-reinstall, I, love, bees">
Halo lore and myth (Score:3, Interesting)
AI history [geeklair.net]
It is imcomplete but does give some more info. Bungie has admitted that Halo fits in the Marathon/Pathways universe but until now has not tied it together. Many insignias and parts of the game are stolen from Marathon. A good discussion on Marathon/Halo connections [bungie.org]
I have always been a Marathon fan as I have mention in previouse posts, as many game play feature predated many pc fps titles for a few years. Unreal Tourny did not invent king of the hill, tag, or kill the man with the ball. These had been around on Marathon for a few years. Bungie also allowed people to mod the games and gave tools out to make maps change graphics, and physics way before people started modding games on pc's. It is unfortunate that one of the most ground breaking FPS titles was on the MAC and gets so little recognition. I still lode up marathon games sometimes and reveal in the map design and story. I feel as well as most people that have played the marathon series that Half-life's story line and maps pale in comparison to what Bunigie did on 1995-1999.
Just my rant...
perhaps, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
And no, "The Beast" didn't culminate in a mass-email that said "Thanks for playing, now go see A.I!!". In fact, I don't think there were any direct references to the movie throught the course of the game (but the game arguably did take place in the A.I universe). I'm imagining the ilovebees thing will play out in the same way.
I know it's microsoft and as such we are required to hate it, but please try to keep an open mind.
Solved! (Score:2, Interesting)
By the way, the META tags indicate a little more than a hoaxy thing
"honey, bees, Margaret, small busines, beekeeping,
hives, retail, market, Operator, bug, buggy, virus, infestation, WTF is
going on with this damn thing, parasite, strong intrusive inclination, medium,
messages, shipwreck, network throttling, SOS, hoax, game, bee hoax, bee game,
survivor, survive, evade, resist, escape, a little help would be appreciated,
thanks and tip your waitress, sleep, is, good, install, reinstall,
re-reinstall, re-re-reinstall, I, love, bees"
Re:re-inactment of a simpson episode (Score:3, Interesting)
(sarcasm) No kidding? Really! And I was gullible enough to think that some dedicated Bungie fan lunatic busted into some random woman's bee site (running IIS of all things) hacked it, told MS about it, and they decided to put it in their commercial! Who would've thought this was a carefully-planned marketing ploy! (/sarcasm)
OF COURSE WE KNOW THAT. We're enjoying a good old-fashioned mystery, likely by the same guys who did the AI thing. As I said, if you want standard billboards plastered all over the place, be sure to let the advertising industry know. I must prefer this version (which requires thought and at least you can turn it off).
metacortechs.com and The Matrix (Score:3, Interesting)
Check out this guide [uiowa.edu]; there's a pretty massive amount of information regarding this and it was great fun to see its development.
Source (Score:2, Interesting)
honey, bees, Margaret, small busines, beekeeping, hives, retail, market, Operator, bug, buggy, virus, infestation, WTF is going on with this damn thing, parasite, strong intrusive inclination, medium, messages, shipwreck, network throttling, SOS, hoax, game, bee hoax, bee game, survivor, survive, evade, resist, escape, a little help would be appreciated, thanks and tip your waitress, sleep, is, good, install, reinstall, re-reinstall, re-re-reinstall, I, love, bees
For anyone with dislexia or ADHD severe enough for them not to read it, one of the keywords is hoax.
Re:Suckers (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:ATTENTION (Score:3, Interesting)
What the hell is X$X
It's got a wildcard in it so it's very hard to google for.
www.xdollarx.co.uk changes regularly (novels that don't exist one week, records that don;t exist the next, 1000 page websites that come and go)
www.xdollarx.com has gone.
Discussion on the xdollarx yahoo group became very odd very quickly, and then all messages were deleted.
The earliest sightings of X$X seem to date from about 1987. All I know for sure is that other parts of the X$X meme are
1) the fake name Michael K and
2) the fake Magazine "Kathedral"
3) "The Building" (a website? a book? a record?)
4) "Smash" (a book? a record? a slogan?)
Re:Suckers (Score:2, Interesting)
I noticed that some of the images are beginning to get garbled. I took a look through them in notepad and began noticeing random text inside the images. Also the
Some examples:
"Continuing on her quest, she spied another"
"The Queen was gone,"
"lay many broken blocks from the ruined"
"her bony fingers, the Widow next"
"She cut her a new mouth and fed her"
This would require a whole lot of work on the site to make the server first parse
Re:Viral marketing (Score:5, Interesting)
The coolest thing about it was that they never even really mentioned the movie AI. It was just generally about artificial intelligence. It was it's own separate thing, and I have to say that it was pretty cool.
I decided to get into this HALO one just for a bit to see where it would go. I saw an IM address on one of the supposed owner of ilovebees.com blog site. (it's mentioned in one of the user comments to the latest entry). What the hell, I sent an IM. Sure enough, I got a bizarre reply back. From a real person, or perhaps a bot? I don't know - seemed like a real person. They said they'd get back to me later.
About an hour later, they IM'd me back. We chatted a bit and then I was invited to a chat room. There were four people there chatting. (Same kind of sureal text that is found on the website). In the chat room, the game HALO 2 came up several times in the conversation.
I think it's still kinda cool that they go to all these lengths to put together an interactive campaign for a game. This one is just a little thin, though. Mentioning the game so early in the "quest" or whatever. Its not quite the same as the AI campaign. But, it would be hard to top that.
Re:Viral marketing (Score:3, Interesting)
"honey, bees, Margaret, small busines, beekeeping, hives, retail, market, Operator, bug, buggy, virus, infestation, WTF is going on with this damn thing, parasite, strong intrusive inclination, medium,messages, shipwreck, network throttling, SOS, hoax, game, bee hoax, bee game, survivor, survive, evade, resist, escape, a little help would be appreciated, thanks and tip your waitress, sleep, is, good, install, reinstall, re-reinstall, re-re-reinstall, I, love, bees"
I mean really
white text on white background reads... (Score:1, Interesting)
Behold the truth
Reveal the truth
That is the law and the whole of the law
Re:They're just trying to create a buzz (Score:2, Interesting)
As part of this, I found the movies with the greatest variance in ratings, and did some weighting to balance out movies that hadn't been rated much. Movies with the highest variance indicated the most disagreement as to whether people loved or hated the movie.
The movie with the biggest variance? (Assuming certain weighting, of course...) The Blair Witch Project. People either loved it or hated it. (I liked it, by the way.)
The top movies that divide us: