unforum

[ixalon]

Interesting - wonder if these will be US-only or if they'll be in other SCE regions. Hopefully someone will get a photo of one of these posters and post it up

[Drunkmonkey]

Found this: http://www.brothersofdrake.com/

That is the Drake coat of arms and there is an input box- I would assume from some of the posters that must be hanging around in big cities like New York.

[ixalon]

Heh, nice find

Especially from a meta point of view, as it's now told us which ad agency is behind the game The domain is registered by someone at Tequila.com, they were the folks that ran the viral campaign for Sony for Shadow of the Colossus.

http://www.tequila.com/#/work/playstation

[Marconelly.]

They did a really nice job with SotC, although if I remember correctly, that wasn't much of an ARG - there were no puzzles to solve or anything of that kind - just the trickle of carefully staged information and well faked 'giants' videos.

[Marconelly.]

The background pattern on the brothersofdrake.com could be a stereogram?

I enhanced the picture by adjusting/compressing levels, and I can clearly see the depth when I watch it like a stereogram, but I can't discern any particular 3D details, just what seems like a random pattern surface.

Is it possible to see depth like this with any random pattern that repeats like it does on this page?

More importantly, by looking through their .css file, I've found this:

http://www.brothersofdrake.com/lib/images/bgs/download.png

[jenni42ld]

That was easy

[Marconelly.]

Oh man... I don't know whether to laugh or to feel really dumb. I saw that phrase there of course, and immediately thought how that's one thing that *there's no chance* to be a correct password

OK, so we have three more symbols for the compass now. Here's a picture with pieces, all enhanced appropriately.

[jenni42ld]

I dunno...

[Cross_]

Re: I dunno...

[tchow]

Nice work! I wonder if we'll be using that submit prompt again? (The whole setup seems like a drop system for downloads, so I don't doubt it.)

W.r.t. numbers on the compass -- looks like they aren't contiguous... so if it is a substitution cipher, as seems likely, maybe it's somewhat out-of-order.
(EDIT to add:) Actually, this makes a lot of sense, because they'd have to include the 'I' over the other block of 4 to stop things from being ambiguous (which means it's down to figuring out where the other blocks of three land).

(Also, looks like of like a 'II' in the up direction on Cross_'s recent "Compass rotated 90 degrees..." picture.)

[Marconelly.]

Re: I dunno...

[Marconelly.]

Could this be of any use? It's a capture from the "Behind The Scenes" video #1 they released maybe a month ago. I was scanning through it yesterday to see something unrelated, and I noticed this spliced in, kinda out of nowhere. Are the compass pictures like this common in the old cartography, and the picture is genuine historical document, or is this something ARG related?

[Cross_]

Interesting find there. I don't think it's a compass though- looks like a calendar with segments marked from 2 thru 30. Also seems to include the phase of the moon.
The guy on the left is Samuel Pepys Google Books has a document on him but I didn't see anything about that calendar :
http://books.google.com/books?id=Gyq6euwfZj8C&pg=PA60&lpg=PA60&dq=sam+pepys+car&source=web&ots=o6b945F_ic&sig=SkiUOvhThQP2KpTW6JGnwUrl-ZE#PRA2-PA73,M1

[geektastic]

This looks like the illustration on the left side of that document. I haven't yet found the full two pages that are the same as seen there, it may be created specifically for this.

I haven't found any connection between Pepys and Sir Francis Drake. Pepys lived from about 1633-1703, much after Drake. However, of interest in terms of maps and such, there's a "phantom island" that was named after Pepys. Apparently the island was really a case of the discoverer mistaking coordinates for a different island, so it's probably not anything. But it does seem like something the PMs might use.

[Marconelly.]

"Raist" from NeoGAF forum took my advice to look for the picture in behind the scenes video and figured this out:

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=204610

I think he's right.





If this is true, that's pretty crazy, this video is more than a month old, much before the ARG started, and I completely randomly stumbled upon it (because I was looking to delete it's duplicate from my HDD). Although they just "re-released" this video for European playstation store (which is why I had a duplicate to begin with)