Stories:My Halo Story

Author: C3PO. This story is actually about Halo 2, back in 2004 according to Wikipedia. I had never even played Halo, but I got wind of the worldwide viral marketing campaign "I Love Bees" which was so cool that nobody even knew it was about Halo at first. An "Alternate Reality Game," it got people to participate in solving puzzles to reveal pieces of a backstory for the new game.  For instance, one of the games was finding payphones via GPS coordinates that if you answered at a particular time would play a snippet of a recorded audio play; put all these snippets together and you got an explanation for the Covenant invasion that begins the game in a dystopian SF future. Needless to say, this kind of scavenger hunt and puzzle game utterly appeals to me; participating in solving these puzzles and meeting other people on the quest was a lot of fun and kept me busy during my lunch breaks that year.   Wikipedia article for reference: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Love_Bees http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Love_Bees]  
I Love Bees ended with a series of Halo 2 releases at Theaters; one of the final puzzles explained how you were supposed to go and get some kind of prize,  Due to some problem with my schedule I showed up late to the theater, but the staff handed me a DVD which was the referenced prize. Vygis had been very interested the upcoming Halo release, but didn't know anything about the ARG, and was bemoaning not being able to afford the new game. I told him that I had this DVD and maybe it had something on it he would like. The funny thing is that he and I both didn't have DVD players on our computers; he was still running some old tower with Windows 95 and I think I had something almost as pathetic. He didn't have a regular DVD player either; I think that we scratched around for some way to play this disk for most of a night until he cobbled together something out of a game console. Finally we got it going and tried to figure out what was on the disk, and it turned out that it was was just a bunch of pictures of people participating in the game. Vygis was Pissed that we'd gone to all this trouble, and all that was on the DVD was "pictures of nerds." I failed to impress him with that one. A week later, somebody he knew had bought the game and had brought it over to his apartment to play it.
Category:Stories
Category:Interests:Video Games:Halo