ARG

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

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
Goldfish
'Think of the'
Pocket Lint
Pocket Lint
'...the... which...'
Cheese Wheel
Cheese Wheel
'may go on... the hidden wickedness...'
Banana Peel
Banana Peel
'...may go on...'
Barn Door Plank
Barn Door Plank
'...year in, year out...'
Secret Diary
Secret Diary
'the deeds of hellish cruelty and none the wiser'
Damaged Capacitor
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

The error message received when crafting two Banana Peels together.

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.

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

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 ARG QR Code 1.png Link
2 ARG QR Code 2.png Link
3 ARG QR Code 3.png Link
4 ARG QR Code 4.png Link
5 ARG QR Code 5.png Link
6 ARG QR Code 6.png Link
7 ARG QR Code 7.png Link
8 ARG QR Code 8.png 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

Birth certificate

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

Last will

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

References