From Team Fortress Wiki

“

— The Scout attempting to solve puzzles 'Kay, this does not look good here, um... ”

An Alternate Reality Game (ARG) is an interactive event that has some portion in the real world and may be influenced by its participants.

Pyromania

Day 1

On June 19, 2012, TF2 was updated with no official patch notes. In the June 19, 2012 Patch itself, however, 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. Following 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.



Stitching these phrases together produces the following quote:

“ — "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches," a Sherlock Holmes story 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. ”

Day 3

An update to the item schema added new records to the Eliminating The Impossible set attribute, consisting of 8 MD5 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 hexadecimal 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.

An example of an error message received when crafting two Banana Peels together

Several communities, 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 PNG images, with the hexadecimal codes corresponding to data chunks of the resulting image. The MD5 hash strings served to act as checksums for verifying the images are assembled correctly. The resulting images produce QR codes 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. The completed transcript contains 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.

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

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 resides). 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 reveals a message in Morse code.

–– ––– –• –•• •– –•–– M O N D A Y

The following Monday, the Pyromania Update was announced.



Note: The June 27, 2012 Patch incinerated the Mysterious Treasures into piles of Ash with the exception of the renamed Barely-Melted Capacitor and the Fireproof Secret Diary which retained their appearance. The July 11, 2012 Patch removed the Ash, again skipping over the Diary and the Capacitor.





Mann vs. Machine

Day 1

The TF2 website as it appeared with the blood spot

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'.

Birth certificate accessed from the link

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

The appearance of the second blood spot

On August 11, 2012, 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. The missing lines disclose that he was being blackmailed by his son Gray and, in response, Zepheniah left Elizabeth his hidden cache of 'miracle' gravel.

The unobscured Last Will and Testament of Zepheniah Mann

The previously obscured will introduced during the 2009 Haunted Hallowe'en Special

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 (Text in italics varies from person to person):

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. An in-game example.

After several communities collected the outputs from high-fiving with a capacitor, the item names were mapped to hex codes. It was found that each class's outputs formed various file formats; The Scout, Pyro, Heavy, and Medic corresponded to a png file, the Soldier to a bmp file, the Demoman to a zip file, the Engineer to a text file containing C++ code, the Sniper to a MIDI file, and the Spy to a link that led to a zip file containing a KeePass key file. The image files were QR codes, the zip file contained ASCII art, the MIDI contained morse code, and the C++ code outputted text. It was found that these words corresponded to hex using the PGP word list.

Class Outputs

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 XOR-ed with the other QR code images led to this link.

The 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". There is also a Tour of Duty Ticket stuck to the back with a paper clip.

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. It appeared along with this sound.

The same text, but from the main menu.

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.

Day 4

On August 13, the Mann vs. Machine update was officially announced.[1]