unforum

[Nightmare Tony]

And another connection which may mean something and mean nothing at all.

Syzygy.
Sente

Sente is a Japanese word from the game Go. Literally, the meaning would be akin to Checkmate. And there *IS* A CONNECTION BETWEEN THE TWO WORDS.

[Nightmare Tony]

And a different way of thinking to the YOU NEED DIRECTION clue...

[Haunted Steve]

im still listening to the sound file, it seems to be: how much of this is real.... but im still undecided, that sound file is truely sinister though

[Wishi-san]

Hey Nightmare Tony (and a sneaking suspicion tells me the friend you were bringing along was Haunted Steve!)

Welcome to the game, or pre-game or whatever stage this shall be called.

The Sente/Syzygy connection is quite interesting sounds like it could be a connection they were going for.

As for direction, well that one is to do with redirection and led to the tinyurl linkage. If you take a read back through this humongously big topic then I'm sure you'll catch up!

Enjoy the ride (when it starts).

[Nightmare Tony]

Thanks and yup, Steve was the one I brought. I was showing him the remains of `the Beast one night in a discussion, and then we ran across the Godsend possible ARG and then to here. He is more of a puzzle solver than me, I am more of a wierd trivia type of guy. Even my boss at work didn't get the Syzygy/Atari/Sente connection, and he has been in the arcade game business for over 3 decades! (only 24 years in it for me).

Missed the tinyurl, had read ythrough, I think I was out of sequence a tad.

Oh, before I forget, Nolan Bushnell presently has U-Wink in Los Angeles, which does Internet type terminals.

For some readon, I think with the Apple computer clue in the main website (the sugar water clue), I am thinking in terms of a fictional computer company as a main subject here. Or might be off base again, but if nothing else, I throw out gut feelings, see what sticks round.

We are both glad to be in, its a brave new world and am pretty stoked to be at the start instead of reading the remains of one. It's a sad sight, kind of like walking through an abandoned amusement park with all the fun being over with..

On a personal level, Steve has one great advantage over me in real life, he is ALREADY running a haunted house round Chicago, while mine is still a couple of years away, mainly from getting the wall material for cheap, anbd the labor to assemble the thing. Got the room for it at least..

Also for giggles, the line for my sig, its my slogan for my haunted house, but see if you can figure out where I had paraphrased it from, somewhere which is slighty related to ARGs in general...

[Papalazarou]

sorry if im just being a newbie but has anyone tried to see if a txt file has been encoded into the music? I found an application on the net to do this but you'd need a passphrase to uncode it. Just thought i'd ask.

[Nightmare Tony]

Possible, but it seems more of a message that can be heard at the very end. Love the musical taste of it, though .

And for some fun giggles at work, found this one power supply board from our fave name bunch, the text on it reads SYZYGY GAME CO. 17-1001.

and no, its nothing to do with the game at hand, but just a cute thing to find with the name looming as the cypher of the year ....

[Godroth]

Every time I see that word syzygy it reminds me of the word of power from the Zork games. Xyzzy or something like that. I know this has nothing to do with the game but i think its funny.

[brat-sampson]

this is most likely nothing but on the main flash, the elaborate P on the first page and the tiny s on the second are in a far higher resolution than the rest of the images, you can zoom right in with no pixellation. I was wondering what they might mean but, of course, 'P'roject 'S'yzygy seems the most likely explanation. Feel free to trout if this has been said.

[bill]

Flash makes heavy use of vector images whenever possible. If they made the letters within the flash environment or in Fireworks, the images would scale indefinitely without pixelating.

Unless, of course, they won't.

[mattat]

Cryptonomicon

[Orphevs]

Hi all. I suppose I'll start with a bit of an introduction. I'm a first time ARGer that sorta meandered my way into this game in a long winding path from trying to find out about the "I Love Bees" buzz going around. I was just sort of wondering what all that fun stuff was about and ended up at the unfiction forums. I then learned about ARGs and decided that I would find one that looked really good and that didn't start for a while so I could try and gain some experience with them. So, here I am, excited about taking part in my first ARG. I've just finished reading through the messages posted for Syzygy so far.

There was one thing I was considering. I was wondering why we didn't try and look at the site that the TinyURL in Alison.rtf went to. I know that we were told to ignore it by the PMs, but it seemed fairly important anywho. Even if the puzzle that the site was supposed to be a step in isn't going to be carried out, I'm sure we could at least find a smidgen or two of interesting data just by considering the site a little bit (I mean it seems like we're all begging for something to do while we wait for this to go live anywho...). I would think the various "direction" "redirection" and other hints dropped by the Hons would make this an obvious solution to what 2oc4o is and the fact that the site that the tinyURL links to is a Crytography site that has as it's first example the same passage that Alison.rtf was changed to is a pretty good indicator, I think, that that was the sight they initially meant us to find, before the change of plans.

But yhea, anywho... that's just my little random blurb. I look forward to an exciting experience with all of you.

[Pedant]

I was of the impression that the TinyURL code was supposed to lead us to the text so that we could solve the puzzle - the puzzle being later changed to make this far more explicit (by including the text itself). Hence all the redirection hints. I also got the feeling the puzzle before it was changed was unfinished. Anyway, we're considering this a closed book for now, but if you do find anything let us know

[theory_grl]

Also new ish...

[Manta]

Quite interestingly enough, SYZYGY was the protoype name for the First Atari System.

This was also the answer to a gaming magazine called "gamepro"'s first "Enigma" You had to solve cryptic clues to find the answer.

Just a thought.