I Love Bees

I have never played a Halo game. I am familiar with the primary character because I live in the (nerdy) world but that's the extent of my familiarity. So, when I recently learned about I Love Bees, I was quite entertained. Apparently, way back in 2004, when Halo 2 was gearing up to be released, Microsoft launched an extensive Alternate Reality Game to promote it. This involved players receiving literal bottles of honey with secret messages inside, fake hacked websites, and a ton of players traveling to random pay phones to interact with characters from the story. This DEEP CUTS episode does a nice job of walking through the details of it all. If you only have 2 minutes of brain space for this topic, watch this instead.

Alternate Reality Games maybe seem less exciting in 2026 because we have YouTube, social media and hyper online personalities that will unravel any little idea as quickly as possible. But in 2004, pre-Youtube, this was not the case. Looking through Wikipedia, the I Love Bees phenomena is one of the earlier examples of using the Internet in this way (at least, to that scale and for marketing purposes.. I suspect there were a number of previous examples not funded by Microsoft).