Obduction ARG

Obduction Alternate Reality Game (ARG) Progress

In late August, Cyan Worlds, Inc. began releasing hints and clues to what would later be revealed to be their new game project, Obduction.

The Three Words

During the Kickstarter video for the game, three words are displayed.

• 3:20 - yellowbrick
• 3:23 - firelight
• 4:05 - germinate

When these words were discovered, and subsequently entered at the Cyan forums, the ("swear-word") filter changed the words to:

• yellowbrick: is.gd
• firelight: odu
• germinate: tol

This was found to be a short URL link: http://is.gd/odutol

The shortlink led to a YouTube video with the title 4/3 π r3, uploaded by user Chester C.

YouTube Video

The title of the video is the formula for finding the volume of a sphere.

The video is three seconds long, cycling through images of different round or spherical objects.

The audio of the video (a series of high-pitched beeping sounds) was found to contain a QR Code leading to the site http://hiredark.com.

Hiredark

The site hiredark.com simulates the appearance of a Linux/Unix shell (terminal) running a count-down timer. The timer is scripted in (dynamic) PHP, which generates a Javascript script. The units of the timer appear to be milliseconds, and the timer itself appears to be counting down to January 6, 2014. In addition, the script is coded to display the message "You do not have sufficient permission to cancel this process." if the user attempts to "end" the counter from the simulated command line using the key combination CTRL+C.

A hint from Cyan

In their Kickstarter Update #12 Cyan gave a hint at the bottom of the update: "/words/<AMA>".

By appending the hiredark URL with "/words/", it was found that http://hiredark.com/words/ is a valid page, but no access granted.

Having a look again to the reddit AMA page, it was suspicious that Rand Miller used the word "swell" really often in his welcome message.

Adding "swell" to the URL again gave a valid page which contains sort of a poem: http://hiredark.com/words/swell/

The Poem

Searching for the text in the strange poem using a search engine revealed that the text was derived by poetry from Walt Whitman, specifically the poem ON THE BEACH AT NIGHT ALONE:

ON the beach at night alone,

As the old mother sways her to and fro singing her husky song,

As I watch the bright stars shining, I think a thought of the clef of the universes and of the future.

A vast similitude interlocks all,

All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets,

All distances of place however wide,

All distances of time, all inanimate forms,

All souls, all living bodies though they be ever so different, or in different worlds,

All gaseous, watery, vegetable, mineral processes, the fishes, the brutes,

All nations, colors, barbarisms, civilizations, languages,

All identities that have existed or may exist on this globe, or any globe,

All lives and deaths, all of the past, present, future,

This vast similitude spans them, and always has spann'd,

And shall forever span them and compactly hold and enclose them.

As one can see, every fourth word from this poem is used for deriving the Cyan version of it.

Variations

Guessing that "words" could be a misspelling, simply trying to browse to http://hiredark.com/worlds/ revealed that this opens a page as well; a page with a pure black background and nothing else in it.

Either once this link was posted in the Cyan forums (assuming Cyan employees watching the progress in the thread) - or by simply refreshing the content of the browser (assuming there is some automated mechanism updating content) - had the effect that the page now contained a small circle. This circle was an image named "worlds.png" (circle color = #667766).

Already earlier is was observed that the dot-color of Cyan's logo slightly changed from a bright cyan (#00d8ff) to a color with hex value #667766.

Once it was posted in the forums that now the content of http://hiredark.com/worlds/ had changed, it was observed that the content already changed again; this time the color of the circle changed to #637777, and the png image was replaced by an svg version.

It was observed later that the color changed again, this time to #55557A. The dot-color in the Cyan logo changed accordingly each time.

All Cyan Posts

Sep 10: Eric A Anderson (edoublea) posts an image on Cyan’s Facebook page under “Photos of Cyan Inc.” with the comment, "...I have tried to speculate where it might have landed, and I must admit however, such conjecture is futile..."

Ainia speculates it has something to do with an outside project of Eric's, The Witness. Eric replies, "Nope Think FARTHER." with "FARTHER" in cyan. Ryan Warzecha (greydragon) posts in the speculation thread, "However Montana has some nice trees, ever think of looking over there?"

Sep 15: Eric A Anderson (edoublea) posts an image on Cyan’s Facebook page with the comment, "Unbounded in its ken..." Zardoz posts, "The quote is from a Robert Gambol poem (The Beauties of the Universe, 1732, partially reproduced below):"

Sep 16: edoublea posts to the thread, "Unbounded in its ken, from prison free / Will clearly view what here we darkly see: / Those planetary worlds, and thousands more, / Now veil’d from human sight, it shall explore." and "Maybe there are more levels to this than you know." with the word "levels" fading in color.

Zardoz speculates "I think the point of "levels" is the shades of grey - which is to say that eaa is telling us the poem itself is important" and edoublea replies, "Perhaps. Or maybe you need to make an adjustment to your thinking."

Malfhok posts an image which, after various image processing things with the exposure and contrast, reveals hidden letters.

Samsbase wonders about the first image and edoublea replies, "Or maybe.... just maybe... eaa didn't embed anything in the first one, because he didn't realize people wanted so desperately to FIND things, and has since remedied that with the follow-ups. But you can keep digging, if you really want to." all in tiny font except for the "keep digging."

edoublea posts an image on Cyan's Facebook page with the comment, "...and each step will be made in the wink of an eye." which is from The Wizard of Oz. Malfhok posts the quote.