Endgame

The following is a message from Jordan L. and Ben B., the two puppetmasters who ran and plotted all of the LandaLan ARG in its short life.

Jordan L. -

First, I'd like to apologize for just dropping the ARG like we did. We had only two puppetmasters, and when both of us run into real life, well, the ARG receives little love.

Before LandaLan, my only experience with ARGs had been helping my friend decode ILB images at the very beginning of that game. Him and me attended high school together, (however we are both in college now -- if you guys are curious, the picture you found earlier associated with Landa Systems was one of us, however, it was a picture taken almost four years ago), and we often passed each other intricate logic puzzles to pass the time. He had been doing ARGs for a while, so with his somewhat fluent experience in the format, and our combined love of logic puzzles and their solutions, we set out to tell a story.

The plot and most of the characters were my creation. I wanted to tell a story with a moral to it. In this case, the moral was going to be something along the lines of "the internet cannot ever be trusted to a single organization, corporate or government". But how to tell it? We went back and forth for weeks over how to reveal what parts of the plot, and overall, I was pleased with how much of it came through to everyone.

Making the puzzles was at least as much fun as solving them, I guarantee it. It was great being challenged to come up with new ways to hide messages without making them undecipherable. I think my personal favorite was either the Pac-Man puzzle, or the phone call puzzle.

This was our first stab at an ARG. It was as much a learning experience as it was a game. For those of you who enjoyed it, and wished it to continue, thank you, but that is simply unfeasible. I personally apologize for starting something like this and not being able to complete it. I understand that it's somewhat bad form to get people interested then pull the plug on it, but unfortunately, that's the way life deemed it die.

Ben and I will be doing another ARG in the future. We'll be better at covering our tracks and we will have the ARG far more planned out/complete. (Remember that day that you guys solved six puzzles in one day? We were literally five minutes ahead of you in creating the puzzles.)

The next ARG we do will not be a LandaLan ARG. We went with LandaLan because, quite simply, we already had the domains for it. All three of them, (and a fourth we never got to). I would like to think that the next one will be much more carefully laid out, but we shall see.

If you would like to further contact me to discuss the game, or anything that happened during the course of it, you can AIM me at: RapIsCrap64 or MSN me at: rapiscrap64@hotmail.com, with just about any question that you needed answered during the game.

Thanks for your participation. I hope you had fun while it lasted. (And sorry for making you go through the trouble of setting up a wiki Bruce... though I would also thank you for it...)

--Jordan aka Demosthenes

PS: As for the glib about Benson Polytechnic's website, yes, it is in a sad state, much to my chagrin. :/

PPS: I'd also like to note that while it may appear that we are very simply throwing in the towel because we don't feel like doing it anymore, we both fought very hard with our current situation before we realized that maintaining out ARG was not going to happen. We set out to provide something interactive and fun. I'd like to think we did that.

Ben B. -

While this has been a blast, we simply don't have enough time to keep it going. This was my first attempt at an running an ARG, I've learned a bunch from it, and had a lot of fun. You guys did great, despite our many flaws. I'm deeply sorry it had to end like this; with only two of us running this, and no funds to work with at all we just didn't have the time to bring it to a nice finish.

For the most part, what we had was thought up on the spot and coded, at times, minutes before you guys reached the page :). The next one I do should be much deeper, planned more in advance, and actually come to a dramatic climax.

I didn't have too much to do with the story line of Landa, I was more responsible for coming up with puzzles. I was responsible for about 75% of the puzzles, and most of the photoshopping work. I prefer the graphical puzzles over anything else, and I already have some good ideas for the next ARG. Although, my favorite puzzle has to be the AJAX one I came up with; at the time I made it I had just finished coding an AJAX search engine for a World of Warcraft item database I've been working on with a friend, and it seemed like a perfect way to introduce a reverse engineering technical puzzle for you guys.

As for the phone puzzle, I'm sorry we weren't able to call everybody, but those that we did get a hold of we're very entertaining. Some of your reactions were priceless :). To pull off that puzzle, I made up the message with Audacity, and set up a Skype account on my laptop. While we were at work one day I stat at my laptop wearing headphones, and dialed in the first numbers that had called the voicemail. While listening in via headphones, as soon as somebody answered I quickly unplugged the headphones, and plugged in a cord to connect the sound out to sound in, and Jordan hit play. Then, after it ended, quickly went back to the headphones to listen in on any conversation / yell of confusion that was said on the other side. It was hilarious.

I'm definitely curious if you have any suggestions, or comments about the ARG, please e-mail them to any of the in game e-mail addresses, or AIM me (SenorElemento).

Oh, and the Picture you found was of Jordan back when we were in high-school (Which we are not, nor have been for years now, thank you very much).

--Ben aka Guest1337