Valve’s Viral Treasure Hunt

I often see the Games and Web industries as siblings. Roughly the same age, both emerged in the late 20th century to cause fundamental shifts in the entertainment and communication landscapes. They have an established and growing overlap that started out with geeky text based MUD (Multi User Dungeon) games in the late 70s that evolved into massive profit churning monsters like World of Warcraft. Similarly, even Facebook has morphed into a viable games platform, with the cutesy Farmville turning over $145 profits in 2009.
As you would expect from such a hip young industry, Game companies are often very savvy when it comes to Internet marketing. In some cases, they could teach the rest of us a thing or two. Take Valve for instance.

Last month, Valve released a small update to its successful 2007 game Portal. Intrigued, users went to play the game, curious as to what changes might have been made. All they found was a small radio. Curious, they picked it up and moved it about, and discovered that in certain places in the game, you could pick up Morse.  The race was on to find and decipher the messages.

While some messages were rather silly, such as the letters L O L, they were keeping for the game’s quirky sense of humour. But others delved further; convinced there was more to the mystery. And they were right. Cryptic crackling sounds were discovered to be encoded images – photographs of secret documents by Aperture Science - enigmatic antagonists of Portal. The video below shows some of the sophisticated detective work carried out.

A total of 22 were discovered in what appeared to be a numbered sequence. This appeared to be the end of the trail when somebody struck on the idea of running the number through anmd5 hash translator and discovered it was a phone number near Kirkland, Washington, near Valve’s HQ.

Then in a twist, it turned out not to be a phone number at all, but a dataline (think dial up modems). Managing to use the images to decipher a password, one of our detectives used the line to log into an ancient Bulletin Board System – a kind of a pre-web precursor to an Internet forum.

On it they found a goldmine of internal documents and ASCII images from Aperture Science, giving tantalizing hints of a full on sequel to Portal. Then – just when the fan community what whipped up into a froth of anticipation – Valve officially announced on their website that they would be releasing Portal 2 later this year.

In terms on engaging with customers, I don’t think you can get any more exciting than an interactive hacker detective story.