YouTube suggested me a video from this channel called
Anomidae from a series called INTERLOPER. Below is a video about it.
I find it interesting because of how much it revolves around the technicalities of the Source Engine, and also how the series creator released actual Source demo files for people to dig through to find bits of info related to the series left by the creator.
See, the reason this is so intriguing is that it's not only an actual ARG by definition by how there are actual files left for the viewers to figure out more clues about the series, it's also intriguing because Valve's Source games and ARG's are like bread and butter.
Years ago, back when Valve still made games and actively cared about them, they have done a few proper ARG's to promote certain things in a very interesting way.
Back in 2010,
Valve released updates to Portal that included ARG elements to promote Portal 2. First it began with adding a radio in one of the levels, where if you took it to a specific spot on the level it would start playing SSTV transmissions and morse code signals. SSTV transmissions are what's used by NASA to transmit images from space to Earth via a sound signal that can be decoded into an image even at very low quality.
Not only that, one of the Morse code transmissions hinted a BBS server. BBS servers were basically the Internet before the Internet, and for people to figure out the next clue they had to get an old 56k modem to access it. So it was a very involved process of getting various hints about an upcoming Portal game, and it was a pretty effective marketing strategy.
They've also done a second smaller ARG right before the release date too.
However the two ARG's that I remember personally were the
2012 TF2 ARG's. The first one was to promote the Pyromania update and it involved a lot of technical fuckery to stitch a JPEG image that was a bit of lore about a new upcoming game mode coming in the update. The second one however was much more complicated and it involved way more file fuckery, ending with people figuring out how to open up a KeePass database of all things that ultimately led to an image that had a TF2 crafting recipe which ultimately led to a new comic giving extra lore being released, and after that Mann vs. Machine update being announced. Valve actually expected for this ARG to take weeks to solve, but instead people cracked it in hours.
Basically, Valve really loved their ARG's in their game, and as you can see, the proper definition of an ARG is more of a wild goose chase that involves complicated fuckery from the audience to pick up all the pieces left by the creator and connect them together to figure out a mystery. It's a fantastic concept that takes considerable effort to pull off, but in the end leaves the audience much more involved in the author's creation and gives them a deeper connection to it. Unfortunately analog horror zoomers have completely bastardized this term and I hope that this guy will manage to bring back the ARG element as I remember it.
I'm sick and tired of analog horror series being called "ARG's" where it's just YouTube videos where you just theorize about only what's presented in the video. Having the creator actually make something for the rest to unravel on their own where it takes some technical skill to do so is way more interesting, and I don't think you could choose a better setting for such a thing than Valve's Source Engine games.
