ARG
On June 19, 2012 TF2 was updated with no patch notes. This led to the start of an Template:W (ARG).
Contents
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.
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[1] 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.[2]
A page from the Saxton Hale Hearing Transcript was found by clicking on a banana peel at the bottom of the page [3]. On the Doomsday game mode page, clicking on the monkey reveals the Poopy Joe Wallpaper [4] and clicking on the logo of MANN CO Monkeynautics reveals another one [5].
Hidden text "NO<...> Until you watch <...>" appeared on the background image of the Pyromania update page, but was later removed [6].
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.
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.
References
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