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 along with any other item drop.

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, 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.