Thursday, September 17, 2009

Halo 3: ODST Viral Videos


With Halo 3: ODST's launch only days away, Xbox Canada has started up some viral marketing for the game. For details, check out this thread on the Xbox Canada General Discussion forum.

Mister Switch and myself work right by the King/Spadina area, and we happened to bump into one another while "looking east and up." After a little searching, we found the attached image, taken with the poor camera on my BlackBerry Curve 8310.

For those who can't make it out, the image is a sticker of a partially completed UNSC Logo with what appears to be binary underneath.

Looks like: 1,0,0,1,0,0,0,1,0 followed by 0,0,0,1,1,0,1,1,0

The camera's pretty poor, so I hope I got that right.

My guess, the other locations likely hold similar stickers that either reveal something when put together, or give another set of coordinates via translating the binary.

UPDATE 1: Higher quality image added.

UPDATE 2: The other three images were snapped and posted, and combined, they look like the following (image courtesy of Mister Switch and Ohmpage).

That's 6 columns, 9 rows of what appears to be binary, but there appears to be lines at the bottom of each column, possibly indicating that each line should be read from top to bottom and translated somehow into a character.

My current theory is that it's a postal code, which will reveal the final part of the puzzle: the last location to look for something. How to translate this code though, well, still working on that one.

UPDATE 3: I spent yesterday evening working on the code. I tried translating it into latitude and longitude (and somehow I doubt the next step will be in the middle of Saudi Arabia), letters, numbers, I tried addition, subtraction, and in the end... nadda. I'm stumped.

Many of us are now thinking we need higher resolution screenshots, and the answer to decoding this puzzle may lie in the UNSC logo itself, or the odd symbol in the bottom left, though to know for certain, we need better pics. To that end, I've taken several additional images, and sent them along to Mister Switch for compilation. I've attached a sample image of a close up of the partial UNSC logo for your viewing pleasure.

More updates as they develop.

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