Haunted Apiary
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The Haunted Apiary (also known as I Love Bees or ILB for short) was an alternate reality game (ARG) that served as a viral marketing campaign for the Halo 2 video game. It is a product of 4orty2wo Entertainment and Sean Stewart, commissioned by Microsoft and approved by Bungie Studios – the creators of Halo 2.
Like all ARGs, The Haunted Apiary was a cross-media game that deliberately blurred the line between in-game and out-of-game experiences. To "play" The Haunted Apiary, interested people would generally visit websites thought to be involved with the game, collect and document the shifting information on these sites, and discuss the game with other users. Players also interacted with the game in unexpected ways, for example by receiving unexpected phone calls from Artificial Intelligence characters, or by sending and receiving emails. At around the same time, an advertisement for Halo 2 shown at screenings of I, Robot at Loews Cineplex theatres flashed a link to ilovebees.com, which is ostensibly a site related to beekeeping.
Both events, not connected publicly for several weeks, caused the curious to visit the website ilovebees.com. The site, which appeared to be dedicated to honey sales and beekeeping, was covered in confusing random characters and sentence fragments. Suspecting that this was a mystery that could be unraveled, Halo and ARG fans spread the link and began to work on figuring out just what was going on.
The game culminated by inviting "crew members" (players) to visit one of 4 cinemas where they could get an early peek at Halo 2. Free souvenirs were also furnished, including a DVD containing much of the story content unlocked in the game. The DVD contained a personal "thank you" message, including a long string of recorded messages players were prompted to submit during the pay phone portion of the game, where players created imaginary names and ranks as part of a fictional starship crew.
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How gameplay worked
The ilovebees.com website first gained public attention when jars of honey were received by members of the Alternate Reality Game community. The jars contained jumbled letters. When cleaned and assembled, the letters spelled out ILOVEBEES. Later, the game would gain its entry into public fervor with the URL's appearance at the end of ads for the Halo 2 game on Xbox. From the blurring of media and mystery, it became clear that this was an Alternate Reality Game. Eager to unravel the mystery of the site's hacking, interested internet users began to explore more information, mostly by trial and error.
Dana, the site's webmaster had created a weblog stating that something had gone wrong with her website, and the site itself had been hacked. In later entries she reported that her attempts to fix it were in vain, and asked for help.
Early players tried emailing Dana, exploring the ilovebees.com website for hidden data, treating the corrupted data on ilovebees.com as encrypted files and attempting to decrypt them, and anything else that seemed like it might reveal information about the game's plot. A community effort was made to piece together the various text from ilovebees.com and a summary of the story, including speculations, unfolded from this text.
Throughout the ILB game, there were many websites that seemed like they might be part of the game; some featured cryptic text and data like the ilovebees site, while others were humorous and clearly fake. Sharing and exploring these, and determining whether they were really part of the game or merely "falsities", became a defining part of playing the game.
Several things found on the ilovebees.com website became dramatic elements of the game. One was a mysterious countdown which claimed to be measuring time until something called "Wide Awake and Physical"; another was a seemingly meaningless set of numbers, which after long speculation was agreed to be a series of GPS coordinates and (later, when more numbers appeared) times. Players around the United States traveled to these coordinates and discovered that payphones exist at those areas. At the given times, these phones rang, and when answered, snippets of dialogue were heard; some snippets sounded like everyday overheard conversations, while others discussed time travel, secrecy, or war.
Players decided that these phone calls were somehow being sent by the same entity that had hacked the ilovebees.com site, and that it was attempting to communicate, albeit in scattered form. When enough phone calls, called "axons" in the website's jargon, were answered in an area, the website announced that the axon was "hot" and a downloadable audio file, identical to the snippet played on the payphones in the area, appeared on the website.
Taken together, these audio fragments tell a story of time travel, artificial intelligence, and interstellar war, with heavy references to the fictional world of the Halo games.
Players in the game occasionally began to receive live calls from an artificial intelligence (AI) program. In these calls, in messages on the ilovebees.com website, and in word-rearranged responses to players who had emailed the webmaster address of the website, a second plotline emerged that involved competing AI programs which inhabited the same crashed spaceship and had found their way onto the internet in a bid for help.
The plot
The plot of ILB is elaborate and convoluted (not helped by the fact that the story was revealed out of order), as well as open to interpretation with regard to gaps in the story.
A military spaceship has crashed on Earth in an unknown location, killing the crew and leaving the craft's controlling AI program damaged. But this AI, known as the "Operator" or informally as "Melissa", is not alone: other AI programs share its system or affect it from other systems. One program, called "SPDR" (an abbreviation of System Peril Distributed Reflex) or "Spider", is a software task meant to repair Melissa, but Melissa, disoriented and self-protecting, does not take kindly to this interference.
In an effort to survive and contact any surviving allies, Melissa transfers itself to a San Francisco-area web server, which happens to host a bee enthusiast website known as http://ilovebees.com. To the distress of the website's maintainer, Dana Awbrey, Melissa hacks into the site and posts data as signals to others. Because of Melissa's damaged state and because of the extraterrestrial targets for this information, it is presented in cryptic and confusing forms.
At the same time, another AI program appears which has until now remained dormant in Melissa's system. Calling itself "The Sleeping Princess" in an allegorical fairy-tale story told in images found hidden on the ilovebees.com website, this AI takes control of the webmaster's email address for ilovebees.com, ladybee777@hotmail.com. The Princess does not understand English, however, and can only cobble together responses using phrases from emails already sent to it.
Dana, attempting to regain control over the corrupted website, accidentally erases data which comprises part of Melissa's memory. Furious, Melissa lashes out at "the Assassin," obtaining pictures of her using the webcam on her computer and promising to take revenge. Alarmed, Dana announces she is washing her hands of the situation and is taking a previously planned trip to China early.
While the Spider is fixing the Operator, it's causing random dumps from its memory onto the website. This includes snippets of conversation from its military crew, which tell of a planet called "Troy" scheduled for destruction, a cylindrical artifact of unknown purpose, an interstellar officer called the "Castaway", and a malicious trojan-horse virus long infecting Melissa later known as the "Pious Flea."
The Spider tries to erase the Flea but is outwitted: Melissa erases the Spider instead of the Flea. The Flea continues to overwrite Melissa's programming with its own mysterious goals: "Seek The Truth, Behold The Truth, Reveal The Truth".
Meanwhile, Melissa reveals audio files to people she believes to be loyal members of her crew. The story follows a band of unlikely heroes, including Janissary James, the 17 year old daughter of a super soldier; another military AI, named "Durga," residing in the computer system of a teenager named Jersey Morelli; a medical student/immigrant to Earth from a colony world called Coral named Kamal Zaman; and a Junior-level Office of Naval Intelligence analyist named Rani.
With the assistance of other characters, the protagonists break into a secure military installation and manage to deactive the Flood "sterilization" sequence of the Halo installation, which would have wiped out all life in the known Galaxy. However, the price paid for the deactivation is a powerful energy transmission which alerts the Covenant to the location of Earth.
A turning point in the story was when some players caused the Sleeping Princess, another AI living on the ilovebees.com server, to be destroyed by Melissa. While many were outraged by this (the child-like Sleeping Princess screams as she is 'murdered'), it is later revealed that the Sleeping Princess was not destroyed, but once more contained. With the aid of the "Pious Flea" the players managed to free the Princess once more and allowed her to merge with Melissa. Melissa had been acting strangely over the course of the game, due to memory loss and the influence of the "Pious Flea", but merging with the Princess (which were revealed to be supressed remains of the AI's human "source") allowed Melissa to restore herself.
Whole again, Melissa saw how she had been manipulated by the Pious Flea, and returned to the her own time, merging with Durga. As a parting gift, she also left another series of audio clips. These audio clips show how the main characters of ILB fared. The tone is somber, as ILB ended with the Covenant invading Earth.
ILB 'ends' the same way in which it began. The System Peril Distributed Reflex, thought to be destroyed, is again in control of Ilovebees.com. Again there is a countdown on the site, but it is a 500 year countdown. The time is believed to count down to the day the Covenant invades Earth in Halo 2.
This improved SPDR destroys the Pious Flea, the Covenant virus that brought about the discovery of Earth, once and for all.
Starting points
Those wishing to read more about the Haunted Apiary ARG should visit the Haunted Apiary Wiki, especially:
Major changes in the game and summaries are documented at the BeeLog.
Speculation surrounding the game
It was believed by many in the Halo and ARG communities that this was a publicity stunt by Bungie, to build up hype for Halo 2, in a manner similar to the game The Beast [1] which surrounded the movie A.I.. Indeed, as Microsoft was behind that first game, there has been speculation [2] that Apiary is a sort of sequel. This was proven to be true to a certain extent, as the developers of the original game, 4orty 2wo Studios, were in fact the creators of ilovebees.
Bungie has had a history of doing these sorts of puzzles for upcoming games. To "announce" Halo, Bungie (or rather, a Bungie employee named Nathan Bitner, now supposedly in the army) released a series of emails later called the "Cortana Letters", in which a character from Halo talks about her reality. As with the Cortana Letters, I Love Bees makes heavy references to both Halo, Halo 2, and an older Bungie game called Marathon.
ILB is considered extremely important to some Bungie fans, as it specifically connects the Marathon series and Halo series. The term Rampancy is expanded in ILB to include AIs which have lived longer than they should have, going 'crazy' in the process.
"Training exercise"
As the ARG came to a close, players were given the chance to go to one of 4 locations for a "training exercise" to take place. While originally open only to ILB players, invitations were quickly extended to the general public. Indeed, most of the people who went to these exercises were not ILB players, merely fans of Halo 2. This caused quite a deal of irritation to devout ILB players, who felt that the exercise was specifically for ILB fans. Amusingly, a few exercise organizers didn't know about ILB; they were told it was a Halo 2 preview event.
Awards
- In March 2005, the design team for the Haunted Apiary was one of the recipients of the Innovation award in the 5th annual Game Developers Choice Awards. [3]
- In May 2005, the Haunted Apiary was announced as the winner of a Webby Award in the Game-Related category. [4] Since 1996 the Webby Awards have been the leading international awards for websites that show excellence in web design, creativity, usability and functionality, and are presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences.
Recent developments
- On March 2, 2006, a new ilovebees site was found - http://www.ilovebees2.com.
- This site is of interest because its vague and cryptic messages seem to refer not to Halo 2, but rather to the Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. This is evidenced by two things: a list of words that are all synonyms for the word "oblivion," and an image in text of one of the characters seen in Oblivion's screenshots.
- Interestingly, Bethesda (the developer behind Oblivion) has had no comment regarding ilovebees2.com.
- The new ilovebees site contains a timer counting down to the end of March/beginning of April 2006. It has been pointed out that this is April Fool's Day, as this makes it likely that the site is simply an attempt to fool 'fanboys' of the original ilovebees and other gullible individuals.
- Although images and other articles of interest have been found on ilovebees2 relating to Bethesda's Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion game for PC and XBOX 360, there is some argument as to whether or not the site serves the same purpose as the original ilovebees did for Halo 2. The keypoint for dissenters is that Bethesda recently set the release date for the game as March 20, 2006, 12 days shy of the counter on the website.
- The webpage also asks for a password, which no one has figured out yet.
- Bungie has now said that ilovebees2.com is a fake
- Alternatively, in a recent news release, Bungie stated that "I mean for one thing, you have to figure that if we were doing a secret vial campaign, we wouldn't call it ilovebees, because you know, that wouldn't be terribly secret." Their misspelling of the word "viral" in the context of the game makes it very suspicious, as both the term "vial" (specifical a Vial of Power) and misplaced/missing/added "R"s have been recent themes throughout.
- ilovebees2.com has changed again. It no longer requires a password. It says it is the website of Ilovebees2.com Inc. It's tagline is "Onas has you".
- On the 7th of april 2006 a freewebs account came up with references to the i love bees saga. Freewebs.com/ilovebeescontinued states that the super great product( Halo 3 described by Bill Gates) will come full circle( thought to be Xbox 360)with blu ray(PS3), and will continue the i love bees saga.It appears to be created by fans of the Halo series.
External links
The game
Fan sites
- welovebees.com
- 'Fireflies' ILB wiki
- NetNinja ILB resources
- theBruce's ilovebees Compilations and fanfiction retelling
- I Love Bees at Halopedia