Halo 2 advertisement, viral campaign, or riddle?

Let the hype begin! Or wait, begin…again! As if E3 wasn't enough of a media blitz for Microsoft's huge and upcoming new first-person shooter, Halo 2, the House of Gates has figured out a way to generate even more "buzz" around Halo 2, this time in the form of what looks like a viral ad campaign.

But is it really an ad campaign…or is it real?

Did some foreign entity really hijack poor Dana's innocent fansite and her mother's hotmail account? Or is her bee-based Website the perfect analogy for the upcoming game's special new aliens? If you read into it enough, are there clues, hints, and secrets that foreshadow incidents in Halo 2? In short, the answers to these questions are: yes, yes, no, no, probably, yes, yes, and yes.

The Hype
Last week, Microsoft launched its first Halo 2 movie trailer, which appeared in about 1,500 Loews Cineplex screens across the United States (the trailer is or will be shown prior to Spider-Man 2, The Village, King Arthur, I, Robot, etc. The same video trailer appeared online last Thursday (see it here Halo 2 movie trailer), where, at its end, a quick, split-second frame shows a Website link, www.ilovebees.com. The site is where it all begins.

Without drawing any direct attention to themselves (Microsoft's PR people answered IGN's call with a strict "no comment"), Microsoft's and Bungie's new viral campaign is both a hype-generating set of threads (ilovebees.blogspot.com, www.bungie.net/Forums/topics.aspx?forum, www.bungie.org/e32003/quiz, and bees.netninja.com -- which is actually a real site, and a real good one at that) and a growing riddle that does indeed provide hints about Halo 2. Each day, the dozens of threads grow with new posts, people putting pieces of the puzzle together, new data, and some damn strange theories.

The Hive Mentality
What's going on? What is this all about? Assuming the obvious, which is that this is a viral ad thingy, we can move on. The surface story goes like this: A woman (a fictitious construct) named Dana who runs a personal Website about bees has apparently had something disturbing happen to her Webpage. Her site has been overrun and her mother's hotmail account hijacked. When you visit www.ilovebees.com you'll see a disturbing screen take over the site. It reads:

"Halt -- Module Core Hemorrhage
Control has been yielded to the

SYSTEM PERIL DISTRIBUTED REFLEX

This medium is classified, and has a STRONG INTRUSIVE INCLINATION.

PHASE 1 COMPLETE: Network throttling has eroded.

In 14 days this medium will metastasize.

COUNTDOWN TO WIDE AWAKE AND PHYSICAL: (the page shows a timer counting down from 30 days.)

Make your decisions accordingly.

The Byzantine message can mean a number of things or nothing at all. But if you follow the blogspot from the link at the page's bottom, you'll learn that "Dana" could very well be in big trouble. On a human interest level, she is looking to travel to China and she doesn't want to leave her mom in the lurch with a broken Website and corrupted email, but in a much larger scale, she may be running from the potential end of Earth. The short and long of it is that an entity or entities of unknown origin have hijacked her site in preparation for something, and that by using email and the Internet they're able to prepare this battle, or worse yet, invasion of Earth.

The theories are out there. Way out there. But as any Bungie fan can tell you, the development studio encourages conspiracy theorists. Hundreds of posters on this www.bungie.net and other boards are speculating about what all these strange messages mean. Fans of Bungie see connections in this viral campaign to, among other things, the original Halo Cortona Letters (a pre-Halo series of letters that served the same purpose), Marathon (Bungie's first popular FPS series on the Mac), and naturally the Xbox. Go here for the best and clearest interpretations (or at least I think they are…). And after an awful lot of reading, one can string together enough "evidence" to connect this "occurrence" to previous Bungie tricks and riddles, to Dana's hijacked site to Halo 2 and the content residing within it.

What's somewhat clear is that the "hijacker" who created the message is using computer code language of some kind to communicate. Communicate what, exactly? Each day we find out more. It's also observing Dana. From the strange soup of various threads and anagram readings a few ideas have surfaced. One idea sounds pretty reasonable: The "invasion" of Earth by the Covenant or perhaps another alien life form should happen about a month before Master Chief arrives on Earth. The countdown is apparently part of a series of phases. At the end of the countdown, Earth, in the Halo 2 universe, will be invaded. The next phase? Not sure yet. But come November 9, we know that Master Chief lands on Earth to fight.

The Sites, Dana, and Friends
When you visit ilovebees.com, a message, using strange wording and unexplained meanings, appears. You're left with the ability to explore the remaining site, which seems to be an innocuous Website dedicated to the love of bees. The obvious link however leads to a blog site, where "Dana" converses with other people, both fictitious and real.

We looked up Margaret's House of Bees and we found it to exist at: 2370 Market Street #510, San Francisco, CA 94114-1575, US. We have yet to visit the location. We also found Dana's phone number (415-248-2617) and called it. There is a simple answering message recording ("Hi, this is Dana…leave me a message, (laughter) blah blah blah."). We left a few messages, but haven't gotten a return call. The phone doesn't actually ring before the message is triggered. You can set your phone to answer this way, but people usually don't, since they generally want to catch the phone call before the message machine gets it. Very suspicious…

Still, if you can't get to SF, there are some excellent sign posts to go by. For the truly lost, you have a lot of reading ahead of you, but these links (and forgive me if I haven't listed them all here) will give you an excellent start. Bungie's forums are obviously a great place to start (you'll have to become free member to see everything) but bees.netninja.com is also an excellent, well organized place read ponderously and deeply.

Here are a few links to get you started:
ilovebees.com
ilovebees.blogspot.com
www.bungie.net
http://users.pandora.be
bees.netninja.com
www.deaddrop.us
forums.unfiction.com


The...Demo Disc?
The initial message on ilovebees.com already has been dissected to the Nth degree. One of the more talked about speculations has resulted in the belief that Microsoft will issue a single-player demo disc in about 27 days, one month from the date the countdown began. Sounds like wishful thinking, doesn't it? Microsoft hasn't had a history of putting out demo discs in the past. And it doesn't need to issue one now. When IGN called last week, Microsoft had no comment on the subject matter.

The logic is best explained courtesy of Ladyrziha over at HBO http://halo.bungie.org and JonR2000. If you rearrange:

"HALT - MODULE CORE HEMORRHAGE SYSTEM PERIL DISTRIBUTED REFLEX. STRONG INTRUSIVE INCLINATION. COUNTDOWN TO WIDE AWAKE AND PHYSICAL:"

You could get... "INDEX THIS IRONCLAD PREDICTION : HALO TWO SINGLE PLAYER DEMO CD-ROM DISK INCURSION AT AUGUST TWENTY FOUR. EARTH WILL NEVER BE THE SAME."

The same poster did throw out this bone for thought, just for balance: "Statistical note: Given a 100-character or more phrase like this one, it's possible to anagram nearly anything you want to see from it. For instance, I can pull out 'HALO TWO HAS BEEN CANCELLED. YOU ARE ALL HUGE SUCKERS.' and still have approx 75 characters to work with." So, you'll either get a Halo 2 demo disc in about a month, or you're a fool. Ingenious.

Why would Microsoft even need to provide a demo disc for what's already admittedly one, if not the, biggest, most hyped games of 2004? Apparently, the company wants to expand the potential number of people who buy the game. The figureheads in Redmond, WA are making the fair assumption that most hardcore Xbox owners are already going to get this game. That means, everyone who's read thes threads, most of the folks who read the IGN boards, those who buy game magazines, college kids, high school kids, and those gamers who already own an Xbox. Who's on the fence? Who's left? Well, there are lots of folks who don't own an Xbox; Sony will tell you that. If there are more than 250 million people in the US, and only 10.1 million own an Xbox, that's 239.9 million potential owners, right? Whoever these people are, these potential Halo 2 owners, Microsoft wants them to buy Halo 2 and with it an Xbox.

A viral thread like this, if done well, can garner enough attention over time (it's a month coundown, remember) to attract mainstream media, newspapers, and eventually TV news. Remember Nintendo's excellent Perfect Dark stealth campaign? It was unusual for Nintendo, but it was a successful grassroots campaign that generated mega-interest. A fake Website was launched for a company called Datadyne, which was the evil corporation in Perfect Dark. The Datadyne Website promised potential job applicants a promising future in a top-secret, high-tech environment and gave hints of dirty government goings-ons. Datadyne info sheets were passed around at colleges and were advertised on college campuses. They were vague sheets that promised a prosperous career in a high-tech, top-secret, dangerous work environment.

It's a long shot, but Microsoft has three months still to go. It's a great way to get people's attention. It's smart, it's a mysterious riddle, and strangely enough, people have enugh time on their hands to dedicated entire Websites just to figuring out what it all means.

If a demo disc of Halo 2 did come out for free, wouldn't everybody play it, including newbies? Despite the majority of developers who are entirely against it, many publishers believe that demo discs, acording to their makret research, actually help increase sales. Not that Halo 2 needs any help, but when you're a publisher, why limit the potential sales of a game like Halo 2? The skies the limit.

The Queen, The Manticore and The Widow
This is where the whole thing gets weird. Really weird. Or, if you're really into it, any mention of the "Queen" could be the most fascinating part the whole conspiracy. Again, the first place to go to learn about this whole ordeal is www.ilovebees.com. From there, the FAQ link at the bottom of the site links to a blog page. There are also heavy mentions of strange entities named the Queen, The Manticore, a Spider, a Widow and more. What the devil?!!?? The Manticore? Sheesh. Like I said, this is where things get really far out there.

If you've played the first Halo, then you'd know about the alien race known as the Flood, an insect-like race. If you've read the books, you'd know the Flood has no queen. If the mention of a queen sounds fishy, then the theory of another alien race being introduced into the mix of Halo 2 is very attractive. Maybe it has a queen. Remember, Microsoft never said a word about the Flood before the game came out, and when players discovered their existence, it was a welcome surprise. It's natural that Microsoft would want to surprise gamers with story elements along these same lines.

If you follow Dana's blog, you'll see some interesting, bizarre, and some very potentially unexplainable messages posted. They all appear to have been written before-hand. If you have ever read message posts before, they sound somewhat like this, but they're much weirder, the varied posters' language is more diverse, and the usually don't stay on topic as well as this one.

In this thread, you'll learn about Queen, The Manticore, a Spider, a Widow as part of a strange metaphorical story.

"When her Queen died, the Widow awoke. She was driven by a single need, which was to return her Queen to splendor. To carry out her task, the Widow came with three tools: an empty lantern, a staff made of bone, and a sharp knife. The Sleeping Princess lay in a chamber of the dungeon in a coffin of glass where the Widow could not hear her breathing."

How do these "characters" refer back to Halo 2 Posters have connected these with Biblical references, Buddhist gods and goddesses, and Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis. Given the immense amount of insect and spider references, it's natural to want to find like connections.

Could the System Peril Distributed Reflex (SPDR) mentioned in the text box actually mean "Widow"? Does the Module Core actually translate into "Manticore? "

Your guess is as good as ours. However, there is also an excellent thread that poses the idea that the Queen and the Manticore are analogies for a computer network in reparation. The link here attempts to connect the SPDR computer text with the Widow's journey.

Conclusion: Stung Like a Bee
Honestly, this article doesn't even scratch the surface of what could be one of the best, and most participated in, advertisements in videogame history. Or...we could all be suckers. But it's already working, right? Hundreds of people are participating, spending hours working together to try and figure it all out. We're writing a huge story dedicated to the possibility of the fictitious site and its implications. As it is now, the corrupted site's been up for about a few days now. The countdown as of this writing is now at 27 days and counting. Each day, Dana and her friends, imaginary and/or real, try to help her, and in the process investigate and solve the layered onion-like riddle that may mean nothing at all. Or, it could provide the skeleton to the story behind this year's most anticipated game.

Taken seriously, there is much here to embrace. The Covenant may be at war with another race, an insect-like race (perhaps a bee-like race) led by a powerful queen. And both are coming to invade Earth, and you must fight both as Master Chief. There may be a single-player demo disc that ships to stores in less than month. (There may not be.) There may be Buddhist, Kakfa-esque, Biblical, and Greek references in the text because Halo 2's storyline mirrors stories from those religions and texts. Bungie could be playing with you all big time. One thing for sure is this: This viral campaign is deep enough, well thought out enough, and labyrinthine enough to get people talking in a fresh, new and intelligent way about Halo 2. And isn't that what it's all about?

Source: Someone's twisted mind