The Last Candle

Halo 2 is coming, and everyone who owns an XBox has their wallet at the ready. Even though the first game’s popular and critical power will sell hundreds of thousands of Halo 2 copies on its own, something new has been added to the mix. An Alternative Reality Game (ARG) has surfaced, which is likely associated to the sequel but might just be about the Bungie game universe in general. (Bungie did a similar ARG with the Cortana Letters several years ago that involved Marathon, an early Bungie game. Not by coincidence, Cortana is the name of the AI in Halo.) The game involved a cryptic, possessed web domain, a niece in distress, stories embedded in odd places, and pay phones ringing from entities with questions. This ARG is quite possibly just an ad for Halo 2, but your usual ad campaign doesn’t get close to this strange, creepy and involved. (Hat tip to my sister, who clued me into this by posting about it on the Shack.) <p/> The Haunted Apiary (Apiary as per m-w.com: a place where bees are kept; especially : a collection of hives or colonies of bees kept for their honey) ARG, as its being called, since the domain name where this all started, ilovebees.com, has been taken over by an “AI named Melissa” AKA The Operator, which has proceeded to implant itself within the domain and using the resources for its own needs. (Remember: it’s all part of the ARG.) A weblog has been sprouted by the owner of ilovebees’ niece, Dana, covering the attempted restore of control and rescue of her aunt’s domain, which was not successful. There’s a helpful sidebar at Dana’s page recounting what she knows to be fact in the story thus far (note , and she’s been updating the blog recently about what she’s discovering day-by-day. This is weird stuff. <p/> It gets much weirder. Aside from The Operator continously doing strange things, the links page at ilovebees was recently changed to include latitude and longitude coordinates with times. People have been going to the appropriate place at the appropriate time, known as an axon, and finding pay phones. If the people are at the correct phone, the phone rings and if picked up, an entity on the other end asks a few questions. Get the answers right, and the axon goes “hot” (and as seen on the links page, quite a few have gone hot). If a set amount of axons for a category go hot, then a sound clip is hyperlinked for that category. How are the sound clips associated? Dunno yet: these axons only went online the 10th. <p/> That’s the gist of it, but there’s much, much more weird-ness to uncover, including an embedded story in images and the HTML source about a Queen, manticores, and a Sleeping Princess. The story was originally kicked off by a few select people getting the letters that make “ilovebees” embedded in honey jars. “Rowan” has an excellent, comprehensive guide of all that’s happened thus far. It’s so intriguing and bizarre that I had to write something, but the community has created many pages devoted to following the Haunted Apiary. Unfiction, a page devoted to ARGs and the like, has a forum set up for the Haunted Apiary. Axon pages exist as well. Finally, aside to Dana’s weblog, the Netninja Bee Log seems to be the definite blog of events in the game thus far. <p/> Whew. This is some creepy, but fascinating stuff. Viral marketing or tenacious, guerilla marketing, maybe. Or maybe not, but regardless: when the marketing — in this case, a game that flows between the digital and the physical world — is this much fun, who cares? <p/> Did I mention that something big is supposed to happen on August 24th — today?