I Love Bees

Why it works

A game disguised as a honey company's website. In 2004 ilovebees.com, apparently the homepage of a small bee business, became the entry point to a viral promotion for Microsoft's Halo 2. Players decoded GPS coordinates and times that sent them to pay phones across the United States, and answering those phones when they rang unlocked new instalments of a radio-style drama set in the year 2552, with an alien army threatening Earth; occasionally a live actor was on the line. Built by 4orty2wo Entertainment (now 42 Entertainment), led by Elan Lee and Sean Stewart, it is studied as the template for the alternate reality game as marketing: a story scattered across websites and the physical world that only a collaborating crowd could piece together. Citing the designers, Wired reported more than a million unique visitors to the site by October 2004, and Henry Jenkins wrote of some half a million players. It won a Webby in 2005 and a Game Developers Choice Innovation Award.