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Post by gliquey on Aug 27, 2014 10:12:43 GMT -5
At least 7 years ago, I played a series of ASOUE-related games on an "Awful Arcade" section of a website about the series (probably found via Google, although possibly put on some front/back page of my UK edition of the books). From searching, I have found that the website was UnfortunateEvents.com and this is a web archive of the game page from January 2014. The real web page doesn't work - at least, not for me. The wayback has archived Desperate Doubles, Bitten Sweets and Breakout (or "No Escape" - I've never understood why the arcade calls it one thing and the actual game another), so I can play those. But is there any archive site that would allow me to play the other games? In particular, I never completed The World is Quiet Here.
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Post by Tryina Denouement on Aug 27, 2014 12:23:54 GMT -5
Yeah, I faced the same problems too!
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Post by Dante on Aug 30, 2014 11:59:07 GMT -5
UnfortunateEvents.com only vanished fairly recently; I suspect that Egmont stopped maintaining it in the light of ATWQ. (It's not even the first time they let the license lapse, and they quite deliberately closed the forum years ago.) I doubt there's much to be done about the missing games except to search through older archived versions, I'm afraid.
Edit: Incidentally, apparently all the arcade games were once part of some elaborate ARG-ish attempt which resulted in co-ordinates to use in The World Is Quiet Here, which rewarded you with some kind of prize contextual to the time the games were first uploaded. I wasn't around whenever that happened, though.
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Post by gliquey on Aug 30, 2014 16:51:41 GMT -5
Edit: Incidentally, apparently all the arcade games were once part of some elaborate ARG-ish attempt which resulted in co-ordinates to use in The World Is Quiet Here, which rewarded you with some kind of prize contextual to the time the games were first uploaded. I wasn't around whenever that happened, though. I don't know what "ARG" means, but yeah, I remember that. There was a map (which I would be very interested to look at: it might have contained a couple of places from the series, but probably also some other alliterative/referential names) and then a boat with some anchors you had to drop. I was playing in ~07/08, if that's relevant to when the games were first uploaded - I don't know if it would have been too late (it was before the ATWQ notice on the website, but after TE came out). I heard the song "Scream and Run Away" recently and quite like it. It took me a while for me to realize that I had heard it before - but not for years and years. It was played in the background on the website and, like Violet recognising "the world is quiet here", it was just about still there at the back of my memory.
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Post by Dante on Aug 31, 2014 5:09:54 GMT -5
What I mean is that all the games were part of a puzzle, and the true purpose of The World Is Quiet Here was to enter the solution of that puzzle, and I guess if you did it early enough then you won some kind of prize? But that was only when the games first showed up, which I think may have been before even my time, and afterwards they were just games.
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Post by gliquey on Aug 31, 2014 12:38:17 GMT -5
What I mean is that all the games were part of a puzzle, and the true purpose of The World Is Quiet Here was to enter the solution of that puzzle, and I guess if you did it early enough then you won some kind of prize? But that was only when the games first showed up, which I think may have been before even my time, and afterwards they were just games. They contained clues if you scored high enough on the games - this was kept the same at least until I played. When you had all the pieces, you could play The World Is Quiet Here. (Or, alternatively, you could methodically guess each possible answer if you were missing a clue because you just couldn't score high enough on that one really annoying game.) It has been ~6 years since I last played the games, but I think the "clues" were just instructions: "Third, go to [puzzling place]"; "First, go to the area above [lousy location]". After writing them down, putting them in a Word document, saving them to memory etc., you had to go along the map clicking on the various places in the right order, and there was one task at the end involving an anchor and some co-ordinates. You could try scoring high enough on the two games I found archived, and I might try that later. It should still work - although I was quite surprised the games themselves worked on just an archive. Previously, I had assumed Wayback Machine was the equivalent of taking a screenshot on various pages at various times, but since I'm not a programmer I wouldn't know how robots copying coding would work. Prize? Like a copy of The Complete Wreck or something? I live in the UK, so if the competition was American (which I imagine it would be), I might not have been able to enter, if I even arrived before the prize was given. If you're talking "prize" as in "psst... there're two Beatrices" - some (canon or non-canon) piece of information, either revealed in the series (but in a book not released at the time) or relevant to it (the TRR taxi driver was the same as the TWW one), I don't remember any, but as I said: I don't think I completed the game. I tried, but I don't think I was close enough to the correct co-ordinates with the anchor for it to count for anything. When was "before even [your] time"? I've been haunting old forum posts on here and I thought you were here for at least TheNamelessNovel.com. I read TBB maybe a year after TNN would have been going on, but wasn't been doing anything ASOUE-related online (other than UnfortunateEvents.com) until I signed up to 667 a few weeks ago.
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Post by Dante on Aug 31, 2014 15:27:12 GMT -5
The competition would've been for the U.K., as UnfortunateEvents.com was the official U.K. site. And this was long, I think, before The Complete Wreck was a factor, though I think that is the kind of prize we were talking about, there was an actual personal physical reward, presumably for a winner picked out of a hat of all those who got the right co-ordinates before date X. As for just when this was, I can't say for sure without searching around, which I'm a little busy for at the moment, but I'd be surprised if I missed it any time after I joined the forum, and that means it was probably before TGG, maybe before TSS.
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Post by gliquey on Aug 31, 2014 15:57:58 GMT -5
probably before TGG, maybe before TSS. The fact that the last game is called "The World is Quiet Here" should indicate the TSS has been written, if not released, by the point the competition was started. But I don't know how long the competition would have gone on for: a week, a month, a year? Does it depend on how popular the website/series was at the time, and if so, how popular was the website/series at the time? Since it's a rather odd title (I can't think why it would be relevant to the game itself), it might indicate that the phrase is something new for the series, rather than just a random phrase from one of the books. TSS was released in 2003, so I was years too late - but the game and the clues were still there, and it functioned as somewhat of a treasure hunt without any prize. It may also explain the ill-defined ending to the game: especially if Egmont weren't taking much care of the website, they may have just cut off the last competition screen or left a message that made no sense any more. Although my memory isn't very trustworthy, I think the last task was to drop an anchor as close to the proper location as you could. I get the feeling that you had to judge where you were in the sea - maybe count 40 seconds or something. I said in the OP that I never completed the game but maybe I got as close to an ending as there was. That could mean that the winner would be the person who gets the anchor exactly on the co-ordinates, or the person who got closest, or randomly selected from a few who got the anchor in the exact right spot. EDIT: Wow, I'm an idiot. It's only just occurred to me to check the archive. In July 2002, the earliest the Wayback goes, "My Arcade" existed (instead of "Awful Arcade"). I'm not quite sure what I'm looking at there, but it seems that Desperate Doubles existed at that time, while the other spaces in the grid-thing were placeholders for games to come. Nothing had changed by December, but by February 2003, at least 9 games existed, along with two "bonus levels" that weren't archived - who knows what they were? By June we have a couple more games and the game titled "The World is Quiet Here" appears between then and October. In December 2003, the arcade page layout had changed to the one I recognise. So TWiQH arrived between June and October 2003, from 3 months before TSS to 1 month after. It probably coincided with the release of the book.
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Post by Dante on Sept 1, 2014 2:44:42 GMT -5
If that's the case, it was probably a TSS-specific promotion. I have a feeling that the prize was pretty good, though.
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crono288
Catastrophic Captain
Posts: 70
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Post by crono288 on Sept 2, 2014 2:12:20 GMT -5
Regarding the Internet Archive, it's possible that some pages have been archived which aren't directly accessible from using the archived version of the site. Unfortunately in this case there's over 22,000 URLs archived for the domain total so sifting through it would be pretty difficult if you don't know what you're looking for; that said, you can find the full list here: web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.unfortunateevents.com/*Incidentally, scrolling through that page I noticed the original PDFs of the character masks (somewhat) recently discussed in this thread and posted the links there! EDIT: After a little sleuthing it seems like the competition in question was called "The Hunt for Lemony Snicket" and the prize was...a computer. www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/local-news/sophie-wins-pc-lemony-snicket-4853640
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Post by gliquey on Sept 2, 2014 4:44:46 GMT -5
Rather odd to offer a computer, I would think, but okay. The competition lasted for "more than a year", apparently. It also says "until the winner was found" - which almost implies to me that the competition didn't have a set time (e.g. "we'll pick the winners in 4 months"), but lasted until the first person managed to do something... get the anchor in the exact right place?
That picture of Sophie is very blurry, but she seems to have TBB and TSS above her, with a picture of the front cover of TCC on screen. At the time, TSS had only been released for a month.
BUT the competition lasted for over a year - that is, it must have been going since at least October 2002 according to getsurrey.com. According to the archives, the Desperate Doubles game was there in October 2002, but no other games were (at least, none load on my screen/the archive) and the TWiQH game only appeared between June and December 2003 - clearly, it was there by October if someone had won the competition by then.
So the article is misleading. It appears that the competition was planned for a year
Will have to leave this post here. I'll finish writing it soon but have to leave right now.
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Post by Dante on Sept 2, 2014 7:11:44 GMT -5
I think the clue games might have been added one by one, with The World Is Quiet Here, the final game used to claim the prize, appearing last and only after the previous ones had been established. It's just a vague recollection I have, but that would account for the long duration of the competition - there was a long period of hype and set-up and a shorter prize-winning period at the end.
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Post by gliquey on Sept 2, 2014 8:43:43 GMT -5
Yes, that would account for it. I wonder when exactly TWiQH was made, and whether the game (and name) was planned from the beginning. If TWiQH was released in June/July/August, the competition itself could have been a set-up for TSS (with "The World is Quiet Here" serving as a somewhat unusual hint to the book). If the game appeared in September, it could have coincided with TSS' release, or it could have been made in October, shortly following TSS and incorporating a phrase used in it.
I wonder when Handler came up with "the world is quiet here" for V.F.D.'s motto - it originates from The Garden of Proserpine, from where we get the "even the weariest river winds somewhere safe to sea" stanza Klaus decodes, but that doesn't mean either were thought up when he was writing TSS. It would be interesting to know what they ("they" being either Egmont or whoever came up with the idea for the competition) were thinking of in regards to the title for the final game, back when the competition first started - if they're giving out clues through games since at least July 2002, they must have had at least a reasonable idea of what the game itself would be, even if it was nameless or had a working title at the time.
But the name TWiQH doesn't necessarily make much sense for the game, at least, not my memory for it. Maybe there was something in the game relative for the phrase: I can't remember a reason for the co-ordinates - were we trying to find something? The Puzzling Puzzles was the first instance I know of where the readers at home were incorporated into an in-universe task ("having completed the training manual, you are now a V.F.D. member"), and I think The Nameless Novel worked along the lines of readers having to play some sort of a detective role with the various clues.
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Post by Dante on Sept 2, 2014 10:49:46 GMT -5
It's worth bearing in mind that "the world is quiet here" first appeared in the U.A., which was published between the eighth and ninth books, and that TSS was not published in the U.K. until, I believe, May 2004. The title of the final game I think simply alludes to it as both a more mysterious entry which is hard to understand for outsiders, and as suggestive of the coded element.
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Post by gliquey on Sept 2, 2014 12:05:13 GMT -5
It's worth bearing in mind that "the world is quiet here" first appeared in the U.A., which was published between the eighth and ninth books, and that TSS was not published in the U.K. until, I believe, May 2004 Of course it did. I haven't read the UA, although I have ordered it and it should arrive in a few weeks. I did think the phrase might be used in there somewhere. However, the UA didn't come out in the UK (according to Wikipedia) until 2007 - after TE. It's a UK website but they can still take the phrase from the UA. Wikipedia didn't say anything about a TSS date in the UK, so I assumed it was published at the same time as in America (September 2003): where do you get May 2004 from? And while we're on the subject, which books were and weren't published simultaneously in the UK and US?
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