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I Love Bees (also known as ilovebees or ILB for short) was an alternate reality game (ARG) that served as a real-world experience and viral marketing campaign for the release of developer Bungie's 2004 video game Halo 2.

The game was created and developed by 42 Entertainment. I Love Bees was commissioned by Microsoft, Halo 2's publisher and Bungie's ultimate parent company at the time. I Love Bees was first advertised by a hidden message in a Halo 2 trailer; players who investigated the titular website discovered that the pages appeared to be hacked by a mysterious intelligence. As players solved puzzles, audio logs were posted to the ilovebees.com site which gradually revealed more of the fictional back-story, involving a marooned artificial intelligence stranded on Earth and its attempts to put itself back together. I Love Bees won numerous awards for its innovation and helped spawn numerous other alternate reality games for video games.

I Love Bees began when jars of honey were received in the mail by people who had previously participated in alternate reality games.

Due to Bungie's commitment to the development of Halo 2 during I Love Bees' run, they were unable to assist 42 Entertainment with story creation, and so the ARG's story is only tangentially related to the main Halo storyline. The events of I Love Bees were, therefore, originally not considered to be Halo canon. In a 2006 interview, however, Bungie's content manager Frank O'Connor expressly confirmed that I Love Bees is part of "things that we embrace as canon." References to elements of I Love Bees have since appeared in The Halo Graphic Novel (2006) and the 2009 Halo Encyclopedia, both of which are official canon.

Other members of the I Love Bees team included Sean Stewart, a World Fantasy Award-award-winning author who served as I Love Bees' writer, and Jim Stewartson, I Love Bees' technical lead who produced the first commercial 3D game delivered by the internet. Weisman stated that the goal of I Love Bees was to utilize every person who interacted with the game, and to use any electronic resource to do so: "If we could make your toaster print something we would. 42 Entertainment conceived I Love Bees as a radio drama, and used the pay phones as a way to excite players.

The players of I Love Bees themselves were quite varied. I Love Bees received several awards for its innovation.

Along with 42 Entertainment's previous ARG known as The Beast, I Love Bees is credited with bringing greater attention to the fledgling marketing form; I Love Bees not only helped assuage fears by marketers about the costs of ARG failure, but attracted interest from other game developers in using alternate reality games to promote their own products. Before I Love Bees, The Guardian stated that "ARGs were destined to join Letsbuyit.com and Barcode Battlers in the e-dustbin of nice ideas that never really caught on"; the explosion of broadband internet access and a renewed interest in codes allowed I Love Bees to become wildly successful. I Love Bees also attracted attention in the wider discussion of user-based marketing and cooperation. Author Charles Leadbeater argued that I Love Bees was an example of "We-Think" collective thinking; Leadbeater noted that after the "puppet masters" began the game, I Love Bees "displayed all the characteristics of a mass movement, propelled into existence in a matter of weeks simply by collective enthusiasm guided by a few cyberspace 'avatars'". In a 2016 Bandcamp interview, artist Ramona Andra Xavier, known for pioneering the Vaporwave musical genre under the pseudonym Vektroid (among others), claimed to be acutely influenced by "I Love Bees," in its use of "hacked" websites, internet communities and IRL tasks to blur the lines between reality and fiction.

Radio drama — the genre of the audio files released as part of I Love Bees.

Quick Facts

• Other members of the I Love Bees team included Sean Stewart, a World Fantasy Award-award-winning author who served as I Love Bees' writer, and Jim Stewartson, I Love Bees' technical lead who produced the first commercial 3D game delivered by the internet.
• I Love Bees was first advertised by a hidden message in a Halo 2 trailer; players who investigated the titular website discovered that the pages appeared to be hacked by a mysterious intelligence.
• I Love Bees was commissioned by Microsoft, Halo 2's publisher and Bungie's ultimate parent company at the time.
• I Love Bees won numerous awards for its innovation and helped spawn numerous other alternate reality games for video games.
• I Love Bees began when jars of honey were received in the mail by people who had previously participated in alternate reality games.

Source material: Wikipedia - "I Love Bees". Adapted and summarized for DiscoverScroll. Original contributors are credited through the linked Wikipedia article. Read original on Wikipedia. CC BY-SA 4.0. Changes were made from the original.