Halo 3 marketing puzzle

I dunno if you folks have been following this rather fun viral campaign. At the end of the E3 Halo 2 trailer, were the odd words ilovebees. Well Halo fans immediately ran off to http://www.ilovebees.com/ which is a “hacked” site of some girl beekeeper. There’s all kinds of detective work being done on this, and folks have decided the hack message is an anagram saying there is a Halo 2 demo coming, and there’s a counter counting down to August 24th.

Linked to from the site is the blog of the owner of the site who is trying to figure out why someone hacked her site. And it gets better. Someone did a domain lookup for the owner of the site (not sure how..I’ve not managed it) and got a phone number. Calling this number gets an answering machine of the girl writing the blog talking about how she’s going far far away, and “mom, I know you call just to hear my voice…I love you too.” and so on.

Suffice to say that the mystery is gaining real traction. I lot of what I just told you I found out from G4TV.Com’s coverage of it. Soon enough the mainstream press will get wind of it…

Brilliant marketing, if you ask me.

And btw, in a somewhat related note, Doom 3 has puzzles in it that you have to go onto the web to solve, too. You’ll find urls in the game that are ‘real’ on the web, and that hold clues. Pretty neat stuff.