OurColony is asearch opera-typealternate reality game (ARG) and aviral marketing campaign for the early marketing of theXbox 360. The game asks players to form colonies and earn points by completing various tasks. This use of an ARG is similar toI Love Bees, which was a viral marketing campaign for the Xbox gameHalo 2, and another ARG for theXbox 360 gameHalo 3.
On 14 March 2005,emails were sent to members of theARG community, from someone named Gamem8ker, with a link to an image. On the main page of the site were instructions to submit 36 images, as well as a strange series of letter combinations. It was explained that "when the right 36 pictures are sent to me, the real game begins." The letter combinations turned out to be the codes of internationalairports.
OurColony hit a larger gamer audience on 6 April after an article was published onGameSpot. This overloaded servers and the error message "The colony is quickly growing. Please be patient." became common. With this influx of users came rumors ofhacking,cheating andspies.
InitiallyOurColony's general forums were set up to allow any user to delete any post or thread, making it almost impossible for people to have steady and meaningful communications. This led many players to create forums outside the official site where communication could continue without disruption. The site's general and colony forums were eventually removed.
The game progressed from the first stage,chaos, to the second and final stage,truth; gameplay between the two stages was identical.
The end ofOurColony came with the release of a video showing J. Allard of Microsoft identifying the newXbox 360 console as the successor to the original Xbox. At the end of the video, all participating colonies were listed on a final scroll in the credits, with top-scoring colonies first. The site is no longer owned by Microsoft.
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