Search This Blog

Thursday, May 26, 2011

Backtracking & Bookmarking! Was the Portal 2 Alternate Reality Marketing Campaign Worth It? from Mashable

Excerpt (but I'm reading the whole thing!):

"...The campaign began April 1, when a collection of indie games collectively dubbed “The Potato Sack” was released on Steam (Valve’s cloud-based delivery system — sort of an iTunes for video games). Players began noticing strange symbols and coded messages appearing in the games. Savvy users began to connect these “glyphs” to other games — which were receiving new content from Steam — as well as to external websites and real-world locations. A wiki and IRC channel were created by gaming forum denizens to start pooling information about what has come to be known as the Portal ARG (alternate reality game).

While it’s only been in motion for a few weeks, the ARG is exceedingly complex and tended to unfold in real time, with clues hidden across the web, gaming forums, podcasts, YouTube videos, and the Potato Sack games themselves. Highlights include cryptic blog posts that were deleted soon after discovery, messages in Morse code, clues encoded in the waveforms of audio files, and a handful of interconnected images sent from Gabe Newell, the co-founder of Valve himself, to a few prominent gaming blog editors..."

Posted via email from Siobhan O'Flynn's 1001 Tales

No comments: