I Love Bees was developed as an alternate reality game and a viral marketing campaign for the release of the video game Halo 2.

“I Love Bees was first advertised by a subliminal message in a Halo 2 trailer; players who investigated the titular website discovered that the pages appeared to be hacked by a mysterious intelligence. As players solved puzzles, audio logs were posted to the ilovebees.com site which gradually revealed more of the fictional back-story, involving a marooned artificial intelligence stranded on Earth and its attempts to put itself back together.”

- from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Love_Bees

A Marketing Success

The mystery that shrouded I Love Bees was probably the coolest part about the Halo 2 campaign. People didn’t really, up front, understand what it was or what it was for. This game predated online forums like Reddit, which would have provided a place for people to get together and solve this issue. The mystery that comes from a lack of a support community blurred the line between reality and fiction, and was what I Love Bees had over other alternate reality games like EA’s Majestic.

When playing Majestic, it was very obviously a game you voluntarily participated in. Trying to figure out what I Love Bees was is like being one of the velociraptors in Jurassic Park— you charge at the different pieces of the electrified fence to find out where the vulnerabilities are. 

Exploration Experience

The players were trying to constantly determine what the bounds were with I Love Bees. Once, the game introduced 210 pairs of global position systems coordinates and times, which led to the inclusion of international pay phones into the gameplay. Players stood by the pay phones at the given times in order to receive more clues to continue playing—even during Hurricane Ivan, a Category 5 storm. This intensity of involvement broke down boundaries between the game and real life, redefining our perception of what a game is supposed to be.