Friday 12 March 2010

A little wisdom

Amidst all the praise for Valve's marketing for Portal 2 there has been very little mention of the person I suspect strongly of being behind most of the hidden message concept. I realise that Valve has a strong tradition of shared creativity and responsibility and on one level it is unfair to single anyone out, but consider the following sequence of events:

1. Independent developer starts releasing messages to his fans using a mix of obscure encoding schemes which decrypt to text, images, programs and other codes.
2. The independent developer is hired by Valve.
3. Some time later, Valve starts a marketing campaign by releasing messages to their fans using a mix of obscure encoding schemes which decrypt to text, images, programs and other codes.

That independent developer is, of course, Adam Foster.

2 comments:

The Mad Tinkerer said...

Well it was mentioned in all of the relevant threads I read on the subject as people were decoding the messages and discovering the BBS. Of course, there was also many "helpful" mentions of What's In The Box and other red herrings, but those in the know already suspected Adam's involvement from the start.

Andrew Doull said...

I agree that most of the comments threads I read included a mention, but the the articles referencing the Portal 2 ARG didn't. That's why I figured I'd reiterate it for those who weren't necessarily reading beyond the headlines.