Alternate Reality Games, or ARGs, tend to be deviously complex, and Valve Software‘s latest is now exception: they are sending out a series of elaborate glyphs embedded in images to multiple gaming sites.
The point of ARGs is to crowdsource their solving, joining in with a bunch of other fanatics to make a story out of the cryptic, and Valve is a master at this, so if you have any taste for these events, you may want to head over to the Wiki and get cracking on the clues.
The most likely explanation so far is that this ARG is to promote Valve’s much-anticipated physics and teleportation-based FPS, Portal 2, which is due out on Tuesday, April 19th and is the first Valve game to launch simultaneously on the PC and Mac.
The image above is about 8/9ths of the image puzzle that has been solved so far, and looks much like one of GlaDOS’s personality cores rom the original Portal.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
