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.

Sept 10th: 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..."

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/