I Love Bees
Alternate reality game marketing Halo 2 via pay phones and puzzles.
http://ilovebees.com/ · via Wikipedia: I Love Bees · Fair use
I Love Bees (also known as ilovebees or ILB) was an alternate reality game (ARG) that served as a real-world experience and viral marketing campaign for the release of developer Bungie's 2004 video game Halo 2. Created and developed by 42 Entertainment and commissioned by Microsoft, the game involved players solving puzzles, interacting with pay phones, and uncovering an audio drama about a marooned artificial intelligence. It attracted millions of visitors and won numerous awards for its innovation, helping to spawn other ARGs for video games.
- Type
- Alternate reality game
- Developer
- 42 Entertainment
- Commissioned by
- Microsoft
- Associated game
- Halo 2
- Launch month
- July 2004
- Peak visitors per update
- 500,000
- Total visitors over three months
- 3 million
Lore & Background
I Love Bees began when jars of honey were mailed to previous ARG participants, containing letters leading to the ilovebees.com website and a countdown. Simultaneously, theatrical trailers for Halo 2 briefly flashed the URL ilovebees.com. The website appeared to be a hacked beekeeping site, with random characters and sentence fragments. The ostensible webmaster, Dana, blogged that her site had been hacked, and fans began investigating. Players were given 210 pairs of GPS coordinates and time codes, which they discovered referred to pay phones that would ring at specific times. One player in Florida stayed by a phone during Hurricane Frances to recite answers to prerecorded questions. Other calls were made by a live 'operator' voiced by Kristen Rutherford, allowing spontaneous interaction. Players also decrypted corrupted data and solved puzzles using image files, earning rewards of audio drama installments that revealed the backstory.
Reader's Guide
I Love Bees is significant as a pioneering alternate reality game that blended real-world treasure hunting, interactive storytelling, and online community collaboration. It demonstrated how viral marketing could engage thousands of participants globally, with over three million visitors to its website over three months. The game's use of pay phones, email, and cell phones to contact players was innovative, and its audio drama format was intentionally reminiscent of Orson Welles' War of the Worlds. Though originally not considered Halo canon due to Bungie's focus on Halo 2 development, Bungie's content manager Frank O'Connor later confirmed in 2006 that I Love Bees is embraced as canon. Elements from the game have since appeared in official Halo media such as The Halo Graphic Novel (2006) and the 2009 Halo Encyclopedia. The game won numerous awards and helped establish the ARG format for video game marketing.
Did You Know?
- 250,000 people viewed the ilovebees website when it launched in July 2004.
- The game's operator was voiced by veteran voice actor Kristen Rutherford.
- 42 Entertainment had previously created the first ARG, The Beast, for the film A.I.
- Bungie's content manager Frank O'Connor confirmed in 2006 that I Love Bees is part of Halo canon.
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