ARG

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

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 along with any other item drop, making them very common.

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 ...'

Day 3

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

The June 21, 2012 Patch added the ability to craft two or more Banana Peels together. This resulted in an error message, written in Spanish, Finnish, and Welsh, containing an error number and string of Template:W codes. 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 community begins collecting the unique error codes and sites, such as this one, begin piecing the data together. It is 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 8 resulting images produce Template:W, that linked to images on the TF2 Official Website. The images contain sections of a transcript.