Has it really been 26 days since Potato Fools Day? What happened and how did it all begin? Sometimes it is hard even for us to keep track of it all. It started off fairly simply, with an email. The origin was Valve, not too out of the norm, but the reason for the email was perhaps the oddest yet. They wanted to talk to us about a cross game promotion involving Portal and would like to know if we’d fly out to Valve HQ to discuss it. The answer, of course was “Yes”! A few days later John was on a plane to Bellevue, WA, and a meeting about the potential collaboration. A few days later John returned with the just unraveling beginnings of the Potato ARG and how Tripwire would be participating. After a large amount of planning and following another meeting in March, those plans were finalized and the ARG was speeding to release. The following was Tripwire’s contribution to the ARG through Killing Floor:

Phase 1:
In the first phase of the ARG, the plan was to deploy potatoes in all of the involved games. This would notify the players that something was up and this might be more than some elaborate April Fools joke. So on April 1st, Killing Floor was invaded by potato money. Along with the visible update, each game included a glyph and a cryptic phrase hidden in the game. We preferred to hide ours in plain sight, while offering some red herrings and clues for future phases of the ARG all in one. The glyph and corresponding letter appeared on the backpack of DJ Scully, one of our in game characters, while the phrase showed up in the profile of another, Mr. Foster. Other character profiles were changed to things ranging from famous quotes from British media to something one of our programmers said just an hour before. Hidden in those changes were three additional clues.

DJ Scully’s profile read “dGhlIHdyaXRlcg==” which, when decoded, means “the writer”. This was supposed to point ARG players from the KF community to Mr. Foster (who is a day trader and is writing his own biography) and that his phrase was important. Due to the fact that many hard core KF players, who this hint was focused at, didn’t pick up on the ARG early on, it ended up leading most of the ARG players on a red herring trip across the internet.

Another clue was in the profile of Paramedic Alfred Anderson, which would lead players to a location on Bedlam but which wouldn’t be used until the third wave of the ARG. His phrase “41 6c 69 65 6e 20 38 20 49 74 2e 20 32 30 37 34 20 2d 34 36 32 39 20 31 37″ translates to “Alien 8 It. 2074 -4629 17″ This was is the location of the man’o lantern on Bedlam.

The final “clue” in wave 1 was one of our own creation, that while found, was never understood. Harchier Spebbington, the main character from The Ball had his profile changed to “Ask Hey Vie”. This is an anagram for I Have Keys. And while it was noticed, nobody hunted down Mr. Spebbington to ask him for a key. He could be found on the Tripwire forums for Killing Floor and The Ball. To all the Red Orchestra fans out there, one of his many keys was a Red Orchestra 2 beta invite! But his key giving days are over for now, so please don’t come asking!

And that brings us to an end of our phase 1 updates.

Phase 2:
A week later, on the 7th, it was time to deploy the second update. The goal of this update was to hint to players that it was GlaDOS who was responsible for all the crazyness that was happening to their favorite games. This was to be done by in-game actions that would pull up an overlay to Aperture Science that would request a password from players. When the correct password was input, a file would be downloaded to the client machine and the next step of the ARG would be on in full force as the players would scramble to open up the files (also encrypted) and find their juicy content of Portal 2 concept art and more clues hidden in the pictures themselves.

To open up the overlay in Killing Floor, we introduced a Potato to the weapons store that cost 70,000 pounds. The goal here was to get players to play the game without spending money and to give all of it to one person to buy the potato. The password, “failed experiments”, was to be found while playing Audiosurf. However, it appears as if it was guessed before it was properly found. Continuing with our theme of hiding things in plain sight, our password, “ugly truth” was found printed in the players log file. To get it to appear one needed to kill multiple specimens with a grenade. This is something that happens often enough in any game that we figured it would be found if anybody would check their log for any reason. This was our one part of the ARG that we feel didn’t go well for us. We thought it would be fairly easy to find, but it wasn’t found until very late in phase 2, but was one of the last pieces players needed to move on to phase 3.

Phase 3:
This phase was the full-on takeover of all the games involved, by GlaDOS, who wants to escape early. For Killing Floor we built the Aperture Science map KF-Aperture. The theme was a joint facility created by Horizine and Aperture, two very “wonderful” companies working together to bring you the latest in scientific breakthroughs. [Actually, they probably want to feed YOU to the "breakthroughs", but that is another story]. The result was loved by the fans, both old and new. Hidden in the map however was a “portal” found by un-welding the right plate on the floor in several rooms that needed player cooperation to gain entrance. On doing so, the player(s) would drop through the portal and wind up on the other side of the map in an observation room. On the wall was a message indicating to players they should try the “Use” key next to one of the computers.

On doing so here and on the man’o lantern located in Bedlam they would be presented with new Aperture Science overlays where GlaDOS would speak new cryptic phrases that tied together the picture clues found in the previous phase of the ARG. After putting it all together the players found a website with a countdown. This countdown was to the final phase of the ARG, the Crescendo.

Crescendo:
As the only game to update in the Crescendo (the goal of which was to just have players playing the games), we open up the central chamber on KF-Aperture and introduce the GlaDOS model into that room. Also “not so much hidden” in that room was a welded door located behind GlaDOS. It required a team effort to bring down during a standard long game, and the reward was the golden potato achievement which was previously unattainable.

Coming away from it all we felt we did many things right, having never participated in an ARG before or having worked with so many other studios at the same time coordinating this massive effort. But at the same time there were hard lessons that were definitely learned both in ARG design and getting the message to your existing player base that they need to pull back the curtain and look beneath. Many of our puzzles were designed with the KF hard core community in mind, and they were near the last of the major groups to pick up that something was going on besides an elaborate April Fools joke (“the secret is to bang the rocks together, guys”). One thing that really worked in our favor was our watching over the ARG players and being able to react dynamically to them being stuck and deciding on new puzzles and hints to guide them forward. All of our in-game news updates as well as our Achievement Glyph puzzle were designed within hours of them going live as a reaction to the state of the ARG players!

At the end of the day, we had an incredible amount of fun both in the design and creation of the ARG and the content for Killing Floor. Valve, as always is an amazing partner to work with, allowing us full access to their IP. Working with all the other companies involved was also a great opportunity to make new friends in the industry as well as toss ideas and suggestions to each other on our current games and future projects perhaps. One theme I think many of us came away with was that collaborations are fun and the games industry needs more of them.

We hope you enjoyed our part of the puzzle, and the KF-Aperture map is here to stay. The overlays and other puzzle/arg content will be removed from the game in the coming days, and Killing Floor will return to business as usual until the next big thing (that’s a hint, by the way…).