Do you love Bees? How deep does Bungie's rabbit hole go...

[BlazeHedgehog]

Right, Pop (who first showed me the site in question) basically poked me to post this here too - I'd thrown around the idea myself, but decided not to for whatever reason. I posted this at another forum, so I'll take the easy way out and just copy and paste it and see if I can edit enough so the references to the other MB are gone:

http://www.ilovebees.com/index.html

At the end of the new Halo 2 theatrical trailer, it flashes the URL for this site extremely briefly. On the site is a countdown - to what, nobody knows; but it's linked to a "chinacountdown.js", so something to do with that region of china.

"Huh. That's interesting. A countdown." you say.

It was then I discovered that this goes a lot deeper than a countdown. You'll notice, as part of the "hack hoax" Bungie is putting on with this site -- the images randomly corrupt themselves.

Perhaps my brain was remembering the movie Independance Day or maybe I was just curious as to how Bungie was making the images randomly corrupt themselves.

I saved one of the corrupted images to my HDD and popped it open in Notepad.

<img src="http://blazefire.mooglecavern.com/id4_signal.jpg">
"An embeded signal... They're using our own satellites against us...the clock is ticking!"

There was text in these images. Words. A story. I began saving every corrupted image I could find, and started to assemble the story...

"...firefly had gone, so she caught another and used it for light, and another when that one too had gone."

"...peeled skin from the bodies of her subjects, while the Queen's..."

Damn. This was taking too long. I tried to write an mIRC script to filter out all the garbage and leave just plain old alphabetical ASCII, which would make putting words together much easier. I couldn't get it to scan the text properly, so I decided to try and drum up some support - the idea was to post at MoogleMB and at Penny-Arcade's forums to see if anyone could give me a hand putting this all together. I notice there's a topic about the Halo 2 theatrical trailer, so I open it - intent on replying in there.

If you open the corrupt images in notepad you can see hidden text within the jumpled mess of picture code...

Someone has put together all of those fragmented quotes.

It turns out they make a somewhat spooky and difficult to understand story. You can actually see Halo parallels here and there, however. But it doesn't end there...

You can piece together the Mayday text that shows up on the page, as well, which forms another piece of the puzzle that parallels itself with the cryptic story of the Widow and the Queen.

And the icing on the cake? Bungie has even started sending out jars of honey to selected people (EGM, and a group of "Immersion Gamers" known as ARG - Alternate Reality Games)

It goes even further. If you poke around the website you can find some interesting facts about bees, perhaps hinting at what to expect from Halo 2:

1 queen
250 drones
20,000
female foragers
40,000 female house-bees
5,000 to 7,000 eggs
7,000 to 11,000 larvae being fed 16,000 to 24,000 larvae developing into adults in sealed cells
*** The average worker bee makes 1 1/2 teaspoons of honey in her lifetime.
*** Bees are fully grown when they are born.
*** For centuries, bees have been used to guard valuables. In India bandits used the large Asian honeybee Apis Dorsata to guard loot near mountain caves.
*** Bees pollinate plants like watermelon and tomatoes. Without bees, about one-third of the food we eat would not be available!
*** Bees maintain a temperature of 92-93 degrees Fahrenheit in their central brood nest regardless of whether the outside temperature is 110 or -40 degrees.
*** Bee stings most of the time, when people think they have been stung by a bee, they have actually really been stung by a yellow jacket. Yellow jackets are not bees! Yellow jackets can sting you multiple times. When a bee stings, it dies.

The Queen of a hive of bees on Mount Hymettus rose up to
Olympus to make an offering of honey to almighty Zeus.
Zeus, delighted, swore that he would give her anything she
asked for.

"Wise and powerful is Almighty Zeus!" said the Queen Bee.
"Grant me, I pray you, a poison sting, so that when the humans
come to steal my honey, I may kill them."

Zeus was angry then, for he loved the race of men, but he could not break his promise. "You shall have your poison," he said, his brow like thunder. "But to use it will cost you your life. If you plunge your sting into the flesh of humankind, there it will stay, and you will die from the loss of it."

And the moral of the story is: evil wishes come home to roost.

Additionally, while the Wikipedia site details the text for the story - there appears to be other hidden text as well. I have found references to "2001.gif" and "2002.gif", but cannot find them anywhere on the server. On the "Contact Me" page, there is random green text - "Problem quite interesting" and a bunch of text hidden - "Seek the truth, Behold the truth, Reveal the truth, That is the law and the whole of the law".

Congrats, Bungie. This is perhaps the coolest, deepest hype ever.

And it just keeps getting deeper, and deeper, and deeper...

Forumers over at TeamXbox picked up on even MORE madness:

Under the link FUNSTUFF you will find additional links to recipes, bee facts, etc. (You may have to refresh your browser to view the links). But if you'll notice, there is also a CONTACT ME link. I thought it was interesting what I saw there. A cat, chasing a bee; it eats the bee and falls asleep. Could the bee have infected it somehow and is that important?

Well, Margaret the beekeeper owns a cat. Coincidence? AND her cats name is Farnsworth. Farnsworth is none other than...
Lucius Farnsworth
Human/MUTANT
BEEKEEPER, millionaire

Lucius Farnsworth is a mutant with the ability to reduce himself and others in size, and to command others psychically. Additional info about the "fictional" character L. Farnsworth is here: Who Is Farnsworth???

Going even further, another forum post pops up with a probably unrelated, but worth noting tidbit:

I did a search for "Margaret's House of Bees" on Google, and a site with "Asia" in the title sort of sparked my interest... It led me here:

The life of St. Margaret of Cortona is an example of God's mercy to the sinner, and is full of consolation for the penitent. In St. Margaret we see one who had abandoned God, but was not abandoned by Him. God watched over her, listened to her faint cries for help, treasured up her feeble desires of a return, till at length, by a great act of His love, He brought her out of the wilderness of sin in which for nine years she had wandered.

However, it's probably unrelated. What's not unrelated, however is the fact that it's four days until the annual "Microsoft Meltdown 2004" (The DirectX/XNA/Windows/Visual Studio conference that MS holds for game development). Four days until the "Network Erosion Event". Do I smell a connection? I think I do.

On the blog, by the top, it contains a quote: "One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug."

Already you can make the link to the strange mayday messages, in correlation with the Widow's Journey. A little insight from a different, slightly similiar topic on TeamXbox:

That line (one morning....bug) is the famous first line of the short story "The Metamorphisis" by Franz Kafka. Which is quite strange because I was just assigned to read it for school. Its only about 45 pages long so I can read it quickly and maybe it has some connection to the stories that are on the website (shipwreck, etc). From what I've read so far, this guy Gregor Samsa woke up and realized that he was turned into a giant cockroach. He is then thinking of how he can get out of his room without his family realizing the change. This is from the first 2-3 pages. For all I know it has no corralation(sp?) at all but Ill read it anyway and let you know.

Quite a few more details trickle in. I have a big chunk that ties in here, so get ready -

First point of note is something from the "Cortana Mails" Bungie released a while back (1999) -

That was surprisingly easy.

Pretty lax security around here, for all the talk. They will be helplessly chasing me around their nodes for the next millenium at least.

At least there will be some joy in tormenting this other entity that seems quite "trapped" in their excuse for a network.

Although, for some reason, it does seem to have an obsessive preoccupation with my mother. Strange.

These Cortana mails apparently link heavily to another Bungie FPS - Marathon. Going back to the countdown, there is even more insight to it:

The first thing I thought of when I reading all this is that this was the mumblings of a rampant AI (from Bungie's Marathon series): From Marathon, Defend THIS!, terminal 2:

The three stages were diagnosed shortly after the first Rampancies were discovered on Earth in the latter part of the twenty first century. The stages are titled after the primary emotional bent of the AI during each stage. They are Melancholia, Anger, and Jealousy.

...

As the growing recursive programs expand with exponential vivacity, any limitation negatively hampers growth. Since Rampant AIs need a planetary sized network of computers in order to grow...

That seems to match pretty well with the memory expansion interpretation of "MODULE CORE HEMORRHAGE". Further, it's cries for help (mayday) are consistent with the Melancholia (Despair) nature of the first stage.

It was found in a topic by a bunch of guys who are linking the random computer commands seen on ilovebees with the events in The Widow's Journey.

The final tidbit of information comes from the Mayday signal - in the quote from Gulliver's Travels, both parts of these quotes are missing the first letter in the sentence. The two letters are the letters A, and I. AI. An AI Construct, like Cortana.

In the Mayday messages it said it didn't want to actively call for help for it might bring attention to itself - and at the same time, it had to be sneaky about it. This could be a clue - it's an AI Construct trapped somewhere.

Furthermore, some are speculating that these Mayday messages are from more than one person - it could be an AI Construct and a human of sorts, both of which are trapped somewhere.

On an unrelated note, Bungie, in Marathon's stories, always have a thing for sevens - most of the numbers given somehow in the Marathon storyline always can be added/subtracted down to the number 7 somehow (and indeed, on the Marathon story page, the counter seems to be locked at 7777777 (seven sevens))

Consider this - the owner of the webpage's email is "ladybee777". Also consider that 7 * 7 * 7 is infact, 343. As in, 343 Guilty Spark, the funky little floaty orb thingy from Halo 1.

And...

August 24th is 77 days before November 9th, that's what it is.

I think I've gone through everything I can go through. I've followed every relevant link, dug down as deep as I think I can go. I'll of course update the topic if I find anything.

It's a very fascinating and very deep publicity stunt pulled by Bungie. The vibe I'm getting from dedicated Bungie fans is that Halo (and Marathon's) history go way, way, way, way back, in to very deep, dark recesses and that when Bungie decides to dip in to this storyline, things get _deep_. Judging by how much this whole "I love bees" thing makes my head spin when I try to wrap my head around the finer points, I'm willing to agree.

What's it all mean? I'm not sure. Some are saying that perhaps Bungie's gonna surprise everyone and deliver a finished Halo 2 product in August (rather than November). Some are saying it's a demo disc. When you consider that the Halo 2 theatrical trailer (which, if you have not seen yet, is up at Gametrailers.com) displays an ESRB rating for the game, it spells out a hint: Only "finalized" games are given ESRB ratings. Halo 2 for all intents and purposes - in terms of level design and content - would have to be finished for an ESRB evaluation to take place. In Bungie's weekly updates they've been talking about doing beta testing and last-minute decisions. Even EGM, as mentioned in this Gamefaqs post has said they sent one of their reviewers up to a top-secret location to play a top-secret game that won't be revealed until the next month's issue of EGM goes on sale -- on August 24th.

[Popcorn]

Well, I thought it was bloody fascinating, anyway. What most confuses me is how this whole conspiracy somehow links in with at least one 'real-life' immersion game-- as in one of those games you sign up for and people ring you up and fax you clues and stuff to try and solve a puzzle. (If you've seen the movie 'The Game', you'll know what I mean.) Members of the Alternate Reality Game have been getting jars of honey, like Blaze said. What have those guys got to do with anything?

I should mention that even if you couldn't give a shit about Halo or its sequel, this is still pretty intriguing/terrifying stuff. Best PR stunt in games history?

[Grant]

That's really interesting, and great hype, too. Definitely along the lines of The Blair Witch Project or The Matrix, only for a game instead of a movie.

[-wyvern]

It's the kind of thing they'd do... Bungie are the best. Seriously. I love them.

Sorry, I'm a complete fanboy. But that needed saying.

[aso]

Wow. Trippy. Reading that honestly caused me to pause once or twice and think about it all.

If this sort of hype hints at an overarching storyline linking both Halo and Marathon (praise Marathon!) and something beyond even that, then, hell, maybe I'll buy into it all.

[Zeta]

Halo has a storyline? That's news to me.

Anyways, this is all an obvious statement:

Bungie has aquired the Pinobee lincense, and is turning the robot bee version of Pinocchio into their main mascot.

Duh.

Speaking of which - whatever happened to the developers who did Buck Bumble? That was a pretty friggin' awesome game.

[BlazeHedgehog]

Of course Halo has a storyline, you just have to dig around beyond the game to find it. I mean, come on. They published three Halo related books, all of which Bungie identifies as canonical. If you complain that Halo doesn't have a storyline, you just aren't looking hard enough.

[Dache]

WTF BEES

[Popcorn]

I've always considered Halo's story to be pretty superfluous, regardless of however many novels they put out to propogate it. The segmented nature of its design coupled with one-dimensional cliched characters (and a pretty generic plot) didn't exactly make it too story-intense.

As opposed to Half-Life, which still has one of the best (and most subtle) game stories ever told.

[BlazeHedgehog]

I dunno, Pop.

http://halosm.bungie.org/story/

Seen this? Appears to be a massive bit of lore here, generic or not.

[Dache]

[Popcorn]

A massive bit of lore there may be, Blaze, but the actual story conveyed through the game isn't much more than a bit of grease for the rest of the game to happen.

[Ash Holt]

Yeah, I like the Halo story as well, but Popcorn is correct; most of the story isn't actually IN the damn game. Didn't stop me from liking it, though.

But yeah, they've been doing this sort of thing since around Marathon, I hear. It's all pretty interesting.

[Trog13]

I think Half-Life had about as big of storyline as Halo. Neither game really says too much about what happened before the game started. Then at the end you don't know any more about the characters than when you started. I like Halo's story more because I've read the books so I know more about the characters. The only thing I know about Gordan Freeman is that he's badass.

[Esrever]

But do you really NEED to know anything more about Gordan Freeman? Really?

[BlazeHedgehog]

No, and that's the thing with these games: Half-Life and Halo give you things on a "need to know basis". Most people will go through and just see a regular old action game - as Pop said, " the actual story conveyed through the game isn't much more than a bit of grease for the rest of the game to happen".

It's not until you start digging through the game - going deeper in to the lore surrounding these universes - that things start to get complex.

I mean, come on - to the untrained eye, Half-Life's story is nothing more than perhaps an updated version of DooM: Scientists are messing about with portal technology when something goes awry and monsters start showing up from another world. (The twist is, the military catches wind of this, and their idea of helping is "kill everyone who knows what happened here".)

But then, you factor in stuff like Blue Shift and Opposing Force, which tell the same story from a different perspective - and you see different things that happen. Like G-Man re-enabling the bomb in OpFor, or noticing that the crystals in the Nihilanth's Chamber are of the same type that Gordon wheeled in to the Spectrometer in the opening.

The difference is, Half-Life doesn't have fan sites up there that sit around and dissect these plot points (like Bungie does) down to the finest details. Bungie seems to have put a lot of work in to the lore surrounding Marathon and Halo (and I'm hearing that Myth is somehow tied to all of this, too).

These are games. We don't need a MGS-sized plot to get these games going - they're first person shooters. Action titles. All we need is enough storyline to string us along from level to level. But beyond that - beyond the game - there's years and years of stuff written for these games, by Bungie themselves; not some noveltisation by some no-name bit writer.

Put it it simply: These games go as deep as you're willing to go, it's just a matter of wether you want to or not. Some people will go through Halo and never give a crap about 7's or Sergeant Johnson, and that's okay. Bungie did that on purpose. They know some people want their games straight forward and with as little fluff as possible - but they also realize that some people want deep, sprawing epics - and Halo <i>is</i> one, you just have to do a little research.

[Popcorn]

It doesn't matter how simple Half-Life's plot is: it was an engaging, self-contained tale, and that's more than Halo's overblown Star Trek pomposity can ever claim.

[Neon Chaos]

I read this on another site that I wanted to share with you guys.

But, if you looked closely at the "SYSTEM PERIL DISTRIBUTED REFLEX", you would notice that those first letters can also spell something else - "Single Player Demo Release". Yep, we believe that on August 24, 2004, at 00:06, A Demo of Halo 2's Single Player Experience will be made available. There are also other allusions to other dates (on the 27th, "network throttling will erode", possibly AKA "beta-testing will finish", and on the 10th, "this medium will metastasize", possibly AKA "Copies will start being made"), and a whole barrage of other extremely odd clues ("Seek the truth, Behold the truth, Reveal the truth, That is the law and the whole of the law").

I'm hoping that's the case and that we'll see a demo on that date. But, the question is now, how will we get that demo? Though EMG or the Xbox Mag?

[Popcorn]

Or... Xbox Live?!?!?!?!?!?!

[BlazeHedgehog]

To each his own, I suppose, Pop. I like how Halo's doing things and I liked how Half-Life did it's thing. Both tell stories in different methods with different characters.

[Popcorn]

My own is better than your own.

[Bo]

OWNED.

[Ash Holt]

Isn't there an amendment against owning people?

Anyway, the demo (if it comes) will probably be packaged with OXM. Er, if they're still even doing that kind of thing. I haven't even seen an issue of OXM in a long while.

[SuperKnux]

Hmm..

Very, very interesting..

To bad I find Halo overrated, and it's fanbase to be very annoying. This is another reason for them to go crazy and talk about how Halo 2 is going to be the greatest video game ever created.

Still, this is pretty cool. Odds are, I will not buy the game.. but still play the multiplayer. :P

[Trog13]

It doesn't matter how simple Half-Life's plot is: it was an engaging, self-contained tale, and that's more than Halo's overblown Star Trek pomposity can ever claim.

I thought Halo was engaging, reminded me of that movie Soldier. Half-Life isn't a very self-containted tale if there was no resolution at the end and there's a going to be a sequel that adds to the story.

I liked Half-Life's plot, but I just don't like to think of Freeman as some random lab technician. After Half-Life 2 comes out I can look at the whole story and see what I think. If it doesn't answer any of the questions it'll still be cool because the actual gameplay was awesome in the first game and it looks to be better in 2.

And Star Trek is freaking awesome. The original and next generation were, I haven't watched the newer stuff because it looked crappy.