ARG

“

'Kay, this does not look good here, um... Click to listen — The Scout attempting to solve puzzles

”

An Alternate Reality Game (ARG) is an interactive event that has some portion in the real world and may be influenced by its participants.

Grordbort's rockets

Main article: Grordbort's rockets

From July 18, 2011 to December 15, 2011, crashed rockets appeared on three maps as a promotional ARG for release of items developed in partnership with the Weta Workshop, including the Dr. Grordbort's Victory Pack Update and Australian Christmas 2011. Players could explore the crashes with Spectate.

Pyromania

Day 1

On June 19, 2012, TF2 was updated with no official patch notes. In the June 19, 2012 Patch itself, however, the following craft items were added to the drop system: Goldfish, Pocket Lint, Cheese Wheel, Banana Peel, Barn Door Plank, Secret Diary and Damaged Capacitor. They dropped alongside every item drop except for crates.

Day 2

The following day, the June 20, 2012 Patch was released. Following this update, any player who equipped the Eliminating The Impossible set would now see new descriptions for the previously added items. The new descriptions would have several random characters replaced by periods, resulting in slightly different strings for each player.

Item	New description
Goldfish	'Think of the'
Pocket Lint	'...the... which...'
Cheese Wheel	'may go on... the hidden wickedness...'
Banana Peel	'...may go on...'
Barn Door Plank	'...year in, year out...'
Secret Diary	'the deeds of hellish cruelty and none the wiser'
Damaged Capacitor	' in such places, and ...'

Stitching these phrases together produces the following quote:

“

Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser. — "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches," a Sherlock Holmes story

”

Day 3

An update to the item schema added new records to the Eliminating The Impossible set attribute, consisting of 8 MD5 hash strings:

Record	Value
md5_388_1	9e86c9d1ba461d7c3b84ea4bac11b921
md5_388_2	f2629207217ce651f1a76ce33346d4c8
md5_388_3	5d1a66650820b260b043443137c23dc5
md5_388_4	0361ca75733f3c21f4ba4ae216e92155
md5_388_5	a0370078eaafd706e75e6a2a45b5678f
md5_388_6	0a009353adac7c721d8b4a188a9f8517
md5_388_7	6f1d22a53f398fd4404b7fc9d7b1f356
md5_388_8	eae894257e8b1502807a3a94fd2fcc1c

The June 21, 2012 Patch added the ability to craft two or more Banana Peels together. This resulted in an error message; its header detailing a "Banana Error # (1-8)". The body of the message is in Spanish followed by Finnish roughly translated as "Banana Overflow Error; Detailed Report:". A numbered code follows comprised of a string of hexadecimal sequences. The sequences vary from player to player even among messages with the same Banana Error number. The dismiss button is replaced with its equivalent in Welsh. Crafting the items does not result in the loss of them, and any further attempts to craft them will result in the same error message.

• 

  An example of an error message received when crafting two Banana Peels together

Several communities began collecting the unique error codes and sites and piecing the data together. It was discovered that the 8 error codes correspond to 8 different PNG images, with the hexadecimal codes corresponding to data chunks of the resulting image. The MD5 hash strings served to act as checksums for verifying the images are assembled correctly. The resulting images produce QR codes that linked to images on the TF2 Official Website; there are only seven such images as the codes produced by PNG images 7 and 8 are the same and link to the same page. The images contain sections of a transcript, divided vertically. The completed transcript contains an excerpt of a U.S. Senate hearing featuring Saxton Hale over the death of Poopy Joe and Saxton Hale's involvement with it as well as the disappearance of the entire United States supply of Australium.

• 

  The final stitched image from the images linked to by the QR codes

QR codes

Error code	QR code image	Output
1		Link
2		Link
3		Link
4		Link
5		Link
6		Link
7		Link
8		Link

Day 4

On 22 June 2012, 15:00 PDT, a mysterious blog post was written by the Pyro. This corresponds to the text on the Damaged Capacitor which reads '6.22V1500', giving a time and date of 6/22/12 15:00 PDT (the time zone in which Valve resides). The post reads:

"Mmmmph mmmmph, mmmmm mmmmmp mmmmmph. Mmmmmph mpm! 
 Mmmmmph mph mm! Hm mmmmmph, hmmmmph mm mmmmmph mmmmmph!"

Replacing the long words with dashes and the short words with dots reveals a message in Morse code.

 –– –––  –• –•• •– –•––
 M   O   N   D   A   Y

The following Monday, the Pyromania Update was announced.

Note: The June 27, 2012 Patch incinerated the Mysterious Treasures into piles of Ash with the exception of the renamed Barely-Melted Capacitor and the Fireproof Secret Diary which retained their appearance. The July 11, 2012 Patch removed the Ash, again skipping over the Diary and the Capacitor.

Mann vs. Machine

See also: MvM Pre-announcement references

Day 1

The TF2 website as it appeared with the blood spot

On August 10, 2012, a bloodstain appeared on the site logo on the TF2 blog, which led to a hidden page containing the birth certificate of the previously unknown third Mann brother, Gray Mann. It is stated that he absconded with the unknown entity 'EAGLE'.

• 

  Birth certificate accessed from the link

The August 10, 2012 Patch added Carrier Tanks to 2Fort, Badwater Basin, Double Cross and Granary (Control Point). They can be seen in the distance standing motionless.

Day 2

The appearance of the second blood spot

On August 11, 2012, a second bloodstain appeared on the site logo, this time leading to a hidden page containing the now fully revealed the Last Will of Zepheniah Mann. The missing lines disclose that he was being blackmailed by his son Gray and, in response, Zepheniah left Elizabeth his hidden cache of 'miracle' gravel.

• 

  The unobscured Last Will and Testament of Zepheniah Mann

• 

  The previously obscured will introduced during the 2009 Haunted Hallowe'en Special

In the August 11, 2012 Patch, the Barely-Melted Capacitor was updated to be equippable and several class-specific hashes were added to the item schema.

Record	Value
scout_md5_314	40119059ad74854a84f78a102fb6048d
soldier_md5_516	5f99cc6e57a84e6c52f6df772196a7ef
pyro_md5_323	a8a7188d6911026801eb1a6279d7f0b9
demo_md5_372	1c2594a0d12aba24d304487742205f04
heavy_md5_308	2eb157506d8ca40c919541741b04d432
medic_md5_328	6c5d3d7ea48af4c8ceb8eb801c65de84
engineer_md5_500	928b4eba739114893aff40614aa74b17
sniper_md5_276	6aa6787bc62adcd3d646164c9b68f026
spy_md5_65	5696492788ca11dd2f1eaa9f5294e3d2

When high-fiving a player who has equipped the Barely-Melted Capacitor, text would be printed to the chat box. Each player could see three unique messages, depending on the other person's class.

The text takes the form of this sample output (Text in italics varies from person to person):

 Medic says: Did you hear the story from 1252 where Destruction PDA, Buzz Killer, Something Special for Someone Special, Ubersaw,
 Cowardly Mound, Crate, Buzz Killer, Frying Pan, and the Administrator walked into a bar?

The class listed in the text represents a sequence of data that corresponds with one of the MD5 checksums, and the items and characters listed in the text represent a subsequence of that sequence. The number corresponds to the position of the subsequence. The complete list of all jokes can be viewed here. An in-game example may be seen below.

• 

After several communities collected the outputs from high-fiving with a capacitor, the item names were mapped to hex codes. It was found that each class's outputs formed various file formats; The Scout, Pyro, Heavy, and Medic corresponded to a png file, the Soldier to a bmp file, the Demoman to a zip file, the Engineer to a text file containing C++ code, the Sniper to a MIDI file, and the Spy to a link that led to a zip file containing a KeePass key file. The image files were QR codes, the zip file contained ASCII art, the MIDI contained Morse code, and the C++ code outputted text. It was found that these words corresponded to hex using the PGP word list.

Class Outputs

Class	Output
Scout	scout.png
Soldier	soldier.bmp
Pyro	pyro.png
Demoman	Demoman.zip
Heavy	heavy.png
Engineer	C++ code
Medic	medic.png
Sniper	Sniper.mid
Spy	Spy.kdbx

PGP word list mapping

Class	Format	PGP Word	Even/Odd	Hex
Scout	PNG	Adult	Even	05
Soldier	BMP	Councilman	Odd	3B
Pyro	PNG	Baboon	Even	14
Demoman	ZIP	Apollo	Odd	0A
Heavy	PNG	Goldfish	Even	05
Engineer	C++ Code	Resistor	Odd	C5
Medic	PNG	Goggles	Even	6D
Sniper	MIDI	Unicorn	Odd	EC
Spy	Keypass Database	N/A	N/A	N/A

The password to the Spy's keypass database was the previous class's numeric byte values strung together in order, 053B140A6EC56DEC. The file contained an image of a QR code, which when XOR-ed with the other QR code images led to this link.

The link contained an image describing a recipe of 8 items, which, when crafted together, caused a system-wide alert in-game, notifying players that a new comic, Blood Brothers, was available.

In the aforementioned recipe list image, the letters T, O, B, O and R are visibly stained by blood; this forms the word "TOBOR". There is also a Tour of Duty Ticket stuck to the back with a paper clip.

• 

  The recipe from ARG 2 Day 2. The letters covered by blood spell "TOBOR", "ROBOT" spelled backwards.

• 

  The system-wide alert from ARG 2 Day 2, in-game. It appeared along with this sound.

• 

  The same text, but from the main menu.

Day 3

On August 12, a blog post entitled Blood Brothers went live, announcing that the ARG had been completed. The post said that Valve expected the comic with the same name to be discovered in a couple of weeks, and not twelve hours, as it turned out. A link to the comic was also included in the post.

Day 4

On August 13, the Mann vs. Machine Update was officially announced.