ARG
An Template:W (ARG) is an interactive event that has some portion in the real world and may be influenced by its participants.
Contents
Pyromania
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.
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'. The following Monday, the Pyromania Update was announced.
Mann vs. Machine
Day 1
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'.
The August 10, 2012 Patch added Carrier tanks to 2Fort, Badwater Basin, Doublecross, and Granary. They can be seen in the distance standing motionless.
Day 2
A second bloodstain appeared on the site logo, this time leading to a hidden page containing the now fully revealed last will of Zepheniah Mann. It is revealed he was being blackmailed by his son Gray and, in response, Zepheniah left Elizabeth his hidden cache of 'miracle' gravel.
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 will be printed to the chat box. Each player can see three unique messages, depending on the class of the other person. The text takes the form of this sample output:
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.
After several communities collected the outputs from high-fiving with a capacitor, the item names were mapped to Template:W. It was found that each class's outputs formed various file formats; The Scout, Pyro, Heavy, and Medic corresponded to a Template:W file, the Soldier to a Template:W file, the Demoman to a Template:W file, the Engineer to a text file containing Template:W code, the Sniper to a Template:W file, and the Spy to a link that led to a zip file containing a Template:W key file. The image files were Template:Ws, the zip file contained Template:W, the MIDI contained Template:W, and the C++ code outputted text. It was found that these words corresponded to hex using the Template:W.
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 Template:W-ed with the other QR code images led to this link. This 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"
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.
This link was found [1] by typing tobor on to the end of the TF2 website address, this linked to a page with the Forbidden HTTP status code but now redirects to the MvM page.
The following day, the Mann vs. Machine update was announced.
Gallery
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.
The same text, but from the main menu.
References
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||
