ARG

On June 19, 2012 TF2 was updated with no patch notes. This led to the start of an Template:W (ARG).

Day 1

In the June 19, 2012 Patch 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. With 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 item schema update added new records to the Eliminating The Impossible set attribute, consisting of 8 Template:W 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 Template:W 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.

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

Several communities, such as this one, 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 Template:W images, with the hexadecimal codes corresponding to data chunks of the resulting image. The MD5 hash strings served to act as Template:W for verifying the images are assembled correctly. The resulting images produce Template:W 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. When they are all combined, the transcript is apparently 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.

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 reside). 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 results in the Template:W –– ––– –• –•• •– –•––, which translates to 'Monday'.

Adult Swim TF2 Promotion

Earlier in the same day, Template:W posted an announcement on their web site of a promotion with Valve over the course of the next week. The page contains a button to sign up for Adult Swim's email newsletter, which sends a user to a signup page featuring an image of the Pyro.

Day 5

The next Monday, the Pyromania Update was announced.

An extended version of the Saxton Hale Hearing Transcript, including new illustrations and an interview with The Administrator was found by clicking on a banana peel at the bottom of the page . On the Doomsday game mode page, clicking on the monkey reveals the Poopy Joe Wallpaper and clicking on the logo of MANN CO Monkeynautics reveals another one .

Hidden text "DO<...> Until you watch <...>" appeared on the background image of the Pyromania update page, but was later removed .

Viewing the source reveals the Pyromania logo having an "alt" tag of "Happy 25th birthday animated gif!", referring to the introduction of the Template:W on June 16th, 1987.

Some time after that, the game item schema was updated to include something called "Mysterious Promo 5" .

Trivia

• The QR codes produced from banana errors 7 and 8 are duplicates. This is a reference to the banana problem, a variation on the Template:W in programming. This is when a programmer makes a subtle logic error in a loop, resulting in the code looping one time too many or too few.