Haunted Apiary
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 Entertainmentand
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 a chance to play
Halo 2 before its release, as well as collect many items of memorabilia, including a DVD summarizing the events of the game.
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 theatrical trailers 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 webmaster
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 any other ways players could think of to attempt to gain more
hidden information from the site. 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.
Falsities
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.
Payphones
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, times. Players around the United States traveled to these coordinates and discovered that payphones existed 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.
Players in the game occasionally began to receive live calls from an artificial intelligence 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 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. Readers seeking a detailed explanation of the story should visit any of the summary sites that propageted across the internet after the game's resolution, including
The Netninja Wiki.
The game's story essentially began with a military spaceship crashing to Earth in an unknown location, killing the crew and leaving the craft's controlling AI program damaged. This AI, known as the "Operator" or "Melissa", was not alone. Other AI programs shared its system or affected it from other systems. One program, called "SPDR" (System Peril Distributed Reflex) or "Spider", was a software task meant to repair Melissa, but Melissa, disoriented and self-protecting, did not take kindly to this interference.
In an effort to survive and contact any surviving allies, Melissa transferred herself to a San Francisco-area web server, which happened to host a bee enthusiast website known as
I Love Bees. To the distress of Dana Awbrey, the website's maintainer, Melissa's attempts to send signals began to appear largely as codes, hidden in images or other text, interfering with the operation of the
I Love Bees site and corrupting much of the content.
At the same time, another AI program appears which has until now remained dormant in Melissa's system. Calling itself "The Sleeping Princess" this AI takes control of the webmaster's email address for ilovebees.com, but because this AI has difficulty using the English language, it instead uses phrases constructed from parts of 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 webmaster, 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 earlier than expected.
While the Spider program attempts to fix Melissa, random dumps from Melissa's memory began to spill into the website, largely detailing Melissa's history and expanding on the story element of the
ilovebees game. Of particular note was the revealing of yet another AI, a malicious Trojan-horse virus long infecting Melissa later known as the "Pious Flea." The Spider tries to erase the Flea but is outwitted, as Melissa erases the Spider instead of the Flea. The Flea continues to overwrite Melissa's programming with its own mysterious goals, stated as: "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. These audio files are largely unlocked as real-life players met at the prearranged payphones that the times listed, often having to recite specific phrases mentioned on the site in order to complete their mission. Slowly, a story emerged following a band of unlikely heroes. These characters included 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 real-life protagonists break into a secure military installation and manage to deactivate the "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 contained. With the aid of the Pious Flea the players managed to free the Princess once more and allowed her to merge with Melissa. The merge allowed Melissa to restore the parts of herself that were damaged in the initial crash.
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, corresponding to a major plot point in
Halo 2.
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, and again there is a countdown on the site, but it is a 500 year countdown coinciding with the fictional timeline of
Halo, and likely corresponds to the day the Covenant invades Earth in
Halo 2. This improved SPDR destroyed the Pious Flea, the Covenant virus that brought about the discovery of Earth and led the Covenant to it, once and for all.
Even while the game was running, it became clear that
ilovebees was a
publicity stunt engineered at least in part by
Bungie Studios to build hype for the upcoming release of their title in development,
Halo 2.
Microsoft had played a large part in a similar publicity stunt previously, with their involvement in
The Beast [1], an ARG used to promote the movie
A.I.. The speculation was finally proven after the conclusion of
ilovebees, when it was revealed that the developers of
The Beast, 4orty 2wo Studios, were in fact the creators of
ilovebees.
Bungie also has had a history of doing promotional puzzles for upcoming games, specifically relating to the
Halo franchise. Prior to the announcement of
Halo:Combat Evolved, former Bungie employee named Nathan Bitner released a series of cryptic emails later called the "
Cortana Letters". Although not strictly an
ARG, the
Cortana Letters did encourage fan participation, and melded reality with fiction as Bungie employees pretended to have no idea who
Cortana was or how she was sending her emails.
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.
At each of the "training exercises", fans were given a complimentary DVD compilation of materials released throughout the
ilovebees game. The DVD also included, among other things, a personal "thank you" message from Melissa and a long string of recorded messages players had been prompted to submit during the pay phone portion of the game, creating imaginary names and ranks as part of Melissa's fictional starship crew. Many other promotional items were available depending on location and availability, including posters for
Halo 2. In addition, attendees got the chance to play
Halo 2 multiplayer, before the game's release, on the screens of the theatres they were gathered in.
*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. [
2]
*In May
2005, the Haunted Apiary was announced as the winner of a
Webby Award in the
Game-Related category. [
3] 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.
Starting points
Those wishing to read more about the Haunted Apiary ARG should visit the
Haunted Apiary Wiki, especially:
*
Summary of events*
The Puzzles*
Dana and Margaret*
Speculative story so farMajor changes in the game and summaries are documented
at the BeeLog.
The game
*
ilovebees.com - The "Haunted Apiary"*
The ilovebees weblog*
ilovebees2.com - The Unofficial SequelFan sites
*
welovebees.com*
'Fireflies' ILB wiki*
NetNinja ILB resources*
theBruce's ilovebees Compilations and
fanfiction retelling*
I Love Bees at HalopediaCommunities discussing the game
*
Unfiction forum*
Bungie.net forum thread*[irc://irc.chat-solutions.org/ilovebees An IRC channel devoted to discussing the ARG]
Press coverage
*
First and
second Slashdot articles.
*
Wired article*
"I Love Bees" design team receives a Game Developers Choice Award*
"I Love Bees" Nominated for a Webby Award
