faceless007
Member
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6371/the_portal_two_arg_the_whole_story.php
Way too much good stuff to copypasta (plus I think GAF's practice of copying whole particles should be discouraged) but here are some tidbits:
Way too much good stuff to copypasta (plus I think GAF's practice of copying whole particles should be discouraged) but here are some tidbits:
To help the teams coordinate from our offices spread across multiple continents and time zones, Valve set up a secure wiki where we could share our ideas and critical information that was needed by all of the teams. This is where many of the game and metastructure puzzles were formed. In addition, we had a high-traffic internal mailing list that hit around 150 messages a day during the height of the ARG.
There were no conference calls and no IRC chats. Other than the meeting in December 2010, the only time we all met in person was during a March 10 meeting in Seattle where we finalized our plans and made sure everyone was on the same page for the April 1st #PotatoFoolsDay launch.
The indie developers created far too much content for the ARG to cover it all here. Thankfully, many of us took the time to talk about our puzzles on our own blogs. If you're curious (and don't mind a few spoilers), follow the links here:
Toki Tori and Rush: http://twotribes.com/message/what-we-did-for-the-portal-2-arg/
BIT.TRIP BEAT: http://www.gaijingames.com/?p=2255
The Ball: http://www.theballthegame.com/?page_id=1219
Cogs: http://www.lazy8studios.com/2011/Portal2_ARG_puzzles
Defense Grid: http://www.hiddenpath.com/blog/18/
Killing Floor: http://www.killingfloorthegame.com/potato-arg-a-kf-postmortem/
Amnesia: The Dark Descent: http://frictionalgames.blogspot.com/2011/04/portal-2-arg-postmortem.html
We owe the ARG community a lot of credit for enforcing limits on their own behavior. At one point, the actions of a few hackers threatened to bypass a big section of ARG content. A few individuals managed to crack the system that Steam uses to distribute beta versions to developers for testing, giving them early access to the content. Thankfully, Valve quickly caught on and pulled the content down. At the same time, some of the indie developers hastily beefed up their own in-game security measures. This quick response sent a clear message that this type of hacking was unexpected and unacceptable.
When leaders in the ARG community figured out what was going on, they sent an official apology to Valve and issued a statement on the wiki that this type of behavior was unacceptable. While some amount of hacking continued, this scolding helped.
Even a player who chased after a red herring had a good story to tell. One guy got the idea in his head that he was supposed to find a clue at The Couch Potato, a furniture warehouse in Santa Cruz, California. Team Meat learned about this by monitoring the IRC channel, so Edmund McMillan of Super Meat Boy fame intercepted him at the warehouse and surprised him with a signed copy of Super Meat Boy.
Kidnapped Champions. The second big mistake we made was pulling the ARG champions away from their communities too early. Based on contributions in various games, on the fan wiki and in the IRC channels, we hand-selected a few individuals who had contributed disproportionately to the ARG and offered to fly them to Valve.
In order to give sufficient time to notify them and make travel arrangements, Valve contacted them a few days before the start of the crescendo. We didn't require them to sign any NDAs, but to maintain the fiction, we encouraged them to take a step back from the ARG and claim that they had been kidnapped by minions of GLaDOS.
We failed to realize just how influential these few individuals had been in keeping the ARG running like clockwork. The wiki stopped getting updated, leaving other players confused as to what was going on.
In retrospect, a few minor changes may have prevented this. For instance, we could have altered the fiction of the story in a way that allowed the champions to keep rallying the ARG community in the anticipation that the kidnapping would come later.
The Crescendo. By far the biggest mistake of the ARG was the decision to move up the timeline for the crescendo. We originally scheduled this to start 24 to 36 hours before the imminent 7 am Tuesday launch, but we worried that this would give ARG players in other time zones very little time to participate. So we decided to set the completion threshold much higher so that the crescendo could stretch over multiple days. We moved the start to Friday morning to make it easier for international media to pick up the story before the weekend.
So what really happened? When the final ARG puzzle was solved, it pointed to a webpage with a count-down timer. Players immediately assumed that this was the count-down for the early release of Portal 2 -- a suspicion that they believe was validated by a clue that was sent to several media outlets that included the hint "4/19/2011_7AM=4/15/2011_9AM," where the first time was the published Tuesday release date. In retrospect, it wasn't very hard to see why the the community was surprised and disappointed when the timer reached zero only to be replaced by a page with another timer.
If our goal was to get media attention, then we got it. The extended crescendo gave plenty of time for the news to cover the event, but we sacrificed a lot of goodwill with the players. Those who had been participating in the ARG since the beginning felt let down because there were no puzzles left to solve. They participated in the crescendo by playing the games but found it to be anticlimactic.