The phenomenon that was the I Love Bees ARG, or Alternate Reality Game, well and truly wrapped up this weekend. Players who followed through to its conclusion (some of them, anyway) were treated to a "training session" where they got to see Halo 2 pre-release, and some won copies of the game. Others received commemorative DVDs with the content of the audio drama on it, as well as other things.

On Sunday, to cap it off, the architects behind the game, the so-called "Puppet Masters" held a chat with players about the game. We're put up a transcript of that chat.

Of special interest to Halo fans were a few questions about the relationship between their game and the Haloverse:

AgentMunroe: Is the story in ILB considered official Bungie/Halo backstory, or is there some amount of creative license that you were allowed and used?

sean: So here's how it worked: We went in with a story idea and went over it with some Bungie folks. They made some pertinent suggestions (e.g. the use of the Forerunner artifact as the McGuffin to create the slipstream malfunction) and the ship name Apocalypso. After that, they gave us the Halo Bible. We had the three novels, and then a Bungie person read every script to make sure we didn't so something weird.

There's also a mention of the fact that the ARG players are "just way better at this sort of thing then [sic] they are," referring to Halo fan forums, but we'll let that slide in the interest of general civility.

MrFluffy, who followed the game closely, has written a feature called The Buzz Ends for the Junkyard, and Scott Weisgarber told HBO about a BitTorrent tracker for the ILB DVD.