Haunted Apiary
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The Haunted Apiary (also known as I Love Bees) is an alternate reality game (ARG), related to the first person shooter Halo 2. It was widely believed to be the work of Microsoft and Bungie Studios, who created Halo. However, now that the ARG is complete, we know it to be the work of 4orty2wo Entertainment (http://www.4orty2wo.com/), which was hired by Microsoft and allowed by Bungie.
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The beginning of the publicity
The first reports of the game began around July 16, 2004, when some prominent members of the ARG community received jars of honey in the mail (http://forums.unfiction.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=4619), in which the letters spelling out "ilovebees" were immersed.
At around the same time, an advertisement for Halo 2 (http://files.bungie.org/halo2_teaser-trailer.mov) shown at screenings of I, Robot at Loews Cineplex theatres flashed a link to ilovebees.com, which is ostensibly a site related to beekeeping.
The site, however, was covered in content that did not pertain to bees at all, but was instead some form of gobbledygook. This link quickly spread amongst Halo fansites and ARG sites.
Shortly after the site was "attacked", the webmaster created a weblog (http://ilovebees.blogspot.com/) stating that something had gone wrong, and the site itself was attacked. Later entries state that her attempts to fix it were in vain.
During this time, ILB was infiltrated with “falsities,” fake sites pretending to be a part of the real game. Falsity sites remain one of the most interesting aspects of the alternate reality game culture. The two most memorable were ilovebeer (http://www.ilovebeer.com) (a parody site that Dana actually acknowledged in the blog) and CAPitALLism.org (http://www.capitallism.org), who aimed to re-write Microsoft's scripts with their own, documenting (http://www.capitallism.org/capisce/ilovebees.php) the entire process.
Playing the game
A community effort was made to piece together the various text from ilovebees.com (http://www.ilovebees.com) and a summary of the story that has unfolded from this text, including speculation, is at the Haunted Apiary Wiki (http://bees.netninja.com/wiki/).
A counter to something being "Wide Awake and Physical" expired, and a series of GPS coordinates and, later, times appeared on the Links Page (http://www.ilovebees.com/links.html) of I Love Bees. People going to those coordinates at those times have discovered that payphones exist at those areas, and that something is calling these phones at those locations.
If the person answers correctly, that "axon" (as the AI calls it) goes "hot". When 2 to 12 "axons" go "hot" in an area, a small wave file is put up for download.
These waves are a story comparable to the radio drama War of the Worlds, with heavy Halo references, which follows a band of unlikely heroes, including Janissary James, the 17 year old daughter of a super soldier; a military AI named Durga residing in the computer system of a teenager named Jersey Morelli; and a medical student/immigrant to Earth from a colony world called Coral named Kamal Zaman.
As the plot unfolded, a mysterious device found floating in space and taken back to Earth by a human ship turned out to be a powerful bomb, suspected to have been sent by the humans' enemy, the Covenant. With the assistance of other characters, the group broke into a secure military installation and deactivated the weapon. However, the price paid for the deactivation was a powerful enough energy transmission to alert the Covenant to the location of Earth. Players in the game occasionally began to receive live calls from the AI, Melissa. Group exercises were planned to allow members of her "crew" to interact with each other in interesting ways, one day dressing up from the part of the ship they "served" on, to assembling doctored images of ordinary objects and how they would look in the year 2552. Several other plotlines developed on the ilovebees page in addition to the .wav files, following the existence of the AIs trapped on the server.
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 rather merged into Melissa. Melissa had been acting strangely over the course of the game, because the Princess was a part of the Melissa AI. By merging the SP back into Melissa, she became whole again.
Whole again, Melissa left. 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.
Major changes in the game and summaries are documented at the BeeLog (http://bees.netninja.com/blog/).
Starting points
Those wishing to read more about the Haunted Apiary ARG should visit the Haunted Apiary Wiki (http://bees.netninja.com/staticwiki/beewiki/), especially:
- Summary of events (http://bees.netninja.com/staticwiki/beewiki/TheGuide)
- The Puzzles (http://bees.netninja.com/staticwiki/beewiki/ThePuzzles)
- Dana and Margaret (http://bees.netninja.com/staticwiki/beewiki/DanaAndMargaret)
- Speculative story so far (http://bees.netninja.com/staticwiki/beewiki/StorySoFar)
Theories about 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 (http://www.cloudmakers.org) which surrounded the movie A.I.. Indeed, as Microsoft were behind that first game, there has been speculation that Apiary is a sort of sequel (http://bees.netninja.com/wiki/index.php?title=XBox_Connection). 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 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 ILB was wrapping up, players were given the chance to go to one of 4 locations for a "training exercise" to take place. While originally for only ILB players, the exercises were quickly revealed to the general gaming 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 devoted 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. [1] (http://www.igda.org/awards/pr_2005_0310.htm)
- In May 2005, the Haunted Apiary was announced as the winner of a Webby Award in the Game-Related category. [2] (http://www.webbyawards.com/webbys/current.php#webby_entry_games_related) 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.
External links
The game
- ilovebees.com - The "Haunted Apiary" (http://ilovebees.com)
- The ilovebees weblog (http://ilovebees.blogspot.com/)
- ihatebees.com - An alternate domain that also points to The "Haunted Apiary" (http://ihatebees.com)
Fan sites
- welovebees.com (http://www.welovebees.com/index.html)
- Haunted Apiary Wiki (http://ilb.extrasonic.com/index.php/Main_Page)
- bees.netninja.com
- theBruce's ilovebees Compilations (http://www.thebruce.ca/ilovebees/)
Communities discussing the game
- Unfiction forum (http://forums.unfiction.com/forums/index.php?c=15&sid=d3a0b20f2c39c269cef1c6e5a442f665)
- Bungie.net forum thread (http://www.bungie.net/Forums/posts.aspx?postID=364518&viewreplies=true&postRepeater1-p=1)
- An IRC channel devoted to discussing the ARG (irc://irc.chat-solutions.org/ilovebees)
- Blog and RSS Feed devoted to the ARG (http://bees.netninja.com/wordpress/)
Press coverage
- Slashdot article (http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/07/23/1912259&tid=204) and another one (http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/07/24/1814210&tid=211)
- Penny-Arcade.com Newspost (http://www.penny-arcade.com/news.php3?date=2004-08-16)
- Wired News article (http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,65365,00.html)
- "I Love Bees" design team receives a Game Developers Choice Award (http://www.igda.org/awards/pr_2005_0310.htm)
- "I Love Bees" Nominated for a Webby Award (http://www.argn.com/archive/000231i_love_bees_nominated_for_webby_award.php)
Misc
- Official Halo 2 website (http://halo2.com)
- Mediawiki site devoted to everything Halo (http://wiki.blackboxrepublic.com)