Surgeon Simulator 2013 developer Bossa Studios have revealed how they accidentally launched a Half Life 3 ARG. Back in June they added a mysterious sticker to the bottom of a Team Fortress 2 figurine. This resulted into some fierce detective work by the gaming community, which led them to believe that this is somehow related to Half Life 3.
However this cryptic sticker was in no way related to Half Life 3.
Surgeon Simulator 2013 co-creator Luke Williams recalls this incident to PCGamesN. “The day after we released the first piece of the puzzle, we had to put our foot down and say, look, this isn’t Half-Life 3. But people wouldn’t believe us! They’d say things like, ‘well of course you would say that, wouldn’t you’. We were damned if we did and damned if we didn’t.”
In fact the topic got so hyped up that they were even contacted by Valve themselves. “We had a couple of curious emails from them, all along the lines of ‘hey guys, so what’s all this we’re hearing about Half-Life 3 being announced?'”
Ultimately, the gaming community solved the puzzle and the first person who solved it was from their own forum, something they are proud of.
“It was never something to be solved by one person alone. If we’d had tens or hundreds of people on the case, they never would have figured it out. But we had half of Reddit on the case, so we saw some insane solutions bouncing around. What we didn’t foresee was them brute forcing the keycode. Once they had the middle two digits, it was orders of magnitude easier for them to solve by entering every possible number they could.”
“They did get it eventually. And the first person to solve it was on our forum, so we’re very proud. Kudos to that guy.”
What are your thoughts about this incident? Furthermore how does this affect your appetite for Half Life 3? Let us know in the comments section below.