Greetings Axeheads and welcome to that little slice of heaven we call the weekend! With this week’s blitzkrieg of news coming out of GDC we’ve seen a veritable ass-cake worth of new screens and videos to get us sold on a new slew of games. Impressive as some of them are, it all smells a bit dog to me.
You see, advertising isn’t about a clever product that solves a problem, or getting a laugh out of someone before you show them your URL (those all these can be effective tools). Advertising is about linking a product to a person’s identity or even creating that identity. To really sell someone something you don’t appeal to what they like, but rather who they are.
At this point you’re asking yourself, “Brent, what the shit are you talking about?” I’m talking about Valve. I’m talking about one of the most clever viral marketing ops in recent memory. And it all started with an innocuous update to Portal.
On March 1st, Vavle’s seminal puzzle-shooter Portal was patched; the release notes stated: “Changed radio transmission frequency to comply with federal and state spectrum management regulations.” Upon booting the game players discovered radios scattered throughout the various levels; some out in the open, some hidden, but all with something in common. When picked up and walked to specific areas, the radios began picking up coded signals.
Not all were Morse Code, some were much denser and more complex signals.
Additionally, it was discovered that the ending to the game had been slightly altered (spoiler warning):
Certainly seems like Valve was letting us know things weren’t over for our intrepid antagonist. But what about those crazy radio signals? What’s up with that? Morse code is easy enough to pick out and translate, but what about that second type of signal? Turns out they were slow-scan television, which is an archaic way of transmitting static images. But what sort of images? We didn’t have to wait long before people started decoding the messages.
Among the translations was a number string, which when ran through an md5 has translator was revealed to be a phone number to a Valve BBS. The login credentials were also obtained through the decoded files. People dug out their old baud modems and started dialing up. It was rough going, the line was constantly busy, but the persistent were eventually rewarded with a series of ascii art images depicting some familiar and not-so familiar environs from Portal.
Of course by now actual Portal 2 screens have begun circulating from a forthcoming Game Informer article and and the ascii art star is somewhat on the decline. I’m sure by E3 when we get more info from Valve, this will be all but forgotten. But right now, I’m not quite through marveling at this excellent little marketing campaign. Like I said earlier, advertising isn’t about what we like, its about who we are. Valve knows who we are. And we love this shit.
See you next week.
Viking Brent
The best thing about it was that it actually was really fun to play through Portal again (although I guess it would’ve been almost as great without those update – let’s be honest Portal kicks ass). It was fun to figure out how to get to the radios and where to find those spots just to be rewarded by a somewhat new ending.
While I’m simply not smart enough to have figure all that out on my own I watched closely how the community was working together, making guesses and suggestions and ultimately had a great time.
You’re right, it’s about who we are and Valve seems to know us quite well actually. The timing was just perfect, there was about a month between the first update and the GameInformer article and that’s about how long it took all those smart people out there to figure it all out, even if everything still was pretty cryptic.
The BSoD on Gabe’s GDC Acceptance speech, when he started talking about their future projects was the perfect icing on the cake.
I grew pretty tired of all the viral marketing floating around these days but that whole shit was simply genius.
Valve is still by far the developer i hold with the highest regard, because when they liscenced Id Tech 2 way back in the day and released Half-Life 1 it got me addicted to gaming. I used WorldCraft to build my own mods and expansions, something i never would have done without Valves support and encouragement. When Half-Life 2 came out and they showed off Source and how well they had integrated Havok into the engine, it blew my freakin mind.
Valve has always given so much support to the mod communities and independant developers, Portal was a project started by another small dev team and finished by Valve after they saw the work and hired the devs to finish their project under another name. My biggest problem is there has been no continuation of the Half-Life story in years, and every time they release a new game like Left 4 Dead 2 it pisses me off because i feel like the whole team should have been working on either Episode 3 or Half-Life 3. Not everyone at Valve worked on either L4D or L4D2 in fact i think the vast majority of the team have been working on Half-Life 3 in earnest for at least the last two years, but WHERE IS THE FREAKING GAME. Its been ages since Episode 2 and they were the ones talking about releasing more content, more often. Love them to death, but they better deliver more Half-Life related content soon or i’ll get sulky and leave a ranting comment on EBA. Oh wait
this is awesome. Love it when devs put so much effort and creativity into things like this. Makes you appreciate the marketing and games so much more than say some annoying uncreative gamestop ad, which is the other end of the spectrum.