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I Love Bees Anthology DVD Legally Available Online
celerityfm writes "In case you missed some or all of the I Love Bees alternate reality game promoting Halo 2, Elan Lee (one of the creators of I Love Bees) recently announced the approval of electronic distribution of the I Love Bees anthology DVD that was originally given away to the most hard-core I Love Bees game players at the end of the game! The DVD contains very interesting stuff for any I Love Bees or Halo fans out there as it contains the entire 5+ hour audio story plus behind the scenes looks and other extras. So with that in mind: Gentlemen, start your bittorrents!"
> This "I love bees" garbage is the new era of advertsing.
Garbage?
For those who participated in it, "I Love Bees" was great fun. You got to solve puzzles, run around answering pay phones to open up more of the story, occasionally talk to the live actors themselves in-charachter, and work with other people piecing the plot together. In the end, ILB was a 5-6 hour drama taking place in the Halo universe, all leading up to the events of Halo 2. If you didn't care about Halo, you probably still could have enjoyed the fun of the game. And if you had any interest in Halo, then it really got you interested in Halo 2.
Was it marketing? Of course! No-one was blind to that. But if you think that should immediately disqualify the game from being any fun, let me ask you this:
Have you ever downloaded a game demo? Did you enjoy playing the 1 or 2 levels they provided for free? Did it make you interested in buying the game?
Well, guess what? You were the victim of marketing! You poor fool - you didn't realize that you were just a pawn of the cynical megagame corporations! You may have thought you were having fun playing a little 1-2 level game, but in reality, you were being used!!!!
Or not. Maybe you were just taking advantage of a freebie given out by a company hoping you'd like it and would then buy the full game.
That's exactly what happened with "I Love Bees". Some of us who played will buy Halo 2. Others who don't really care about computer gaming won't. But everyone had fun. And in the end, it doesn't matter if Microsoft was behind it, or Bungie, or just a couple of guys in a basement. It was fun. That is all.
Exactly! Nobody who played "I Love Bees" for any length of time was unaware of its Halo 2 association. And nobody was scandalized to learn that Microsoft/Bungie were behind it.
So what? Microsoft and Bungie put out Halo 1, and I actually paid money to play it! Does that make me a_pawn of faceless corporate overlords? No, it just means they put out a fun game, and I agreed to give them money so I could play it.
So if that was a reasonable transaction, how much better a deal was it to play "I Love Bees" for $0.00 ? I had fun, they got publicity for Halo 2 - everybody wins!