To the distress of Dana Awbrey, the website's maintainer, Melissa's attempts to send signals began to appear largely as codes, hidden in images or other text, interfering with the operation of the I Love Bees site and corrupting much of the content. In an effort to survive and contact any surviving allies, Melissa transfers herself to a San Francisco-area web server, which happens to host a bee enthusiast website known as I Love Bees Archived at the Wayback Machine. This AI, known as the 'Operator' or 'Melissa', is not alone other AI programs share its system. The game's plot begins with a military spaceship crashing to Earth in an unknown location, leaving the craft's controlling artificial intelligence or AI damaged. The game culminated by inviting players of the game to visit one of four cinemas where they could get a chance to play Halo 2 before its release and collect a commemorative DVD. Players were sent messages via email, called on their cell phones, and travelled to arranged meetings between players and characters. Over time, the game's mechanisms for contacting players grew more complex.

After players completed certain tasks, they were rewarded with new installments to an audio drama which revealed the reasons for the malfunction. Other players treated the corrupted data on as encrypted files to decipher, or used image files found on the web server to solve puzzles.

Other phone calls were made by live persons known as 'operators' these calls allowed players to interact with the characters of the games in spontaneous and occasionally humorous ways. Players eventually figured out the coordinates referred to pay phones and the times to when the phones would ring one player in Florida stayed by a phone while Hurricane Frances was minutes away in order to recite answers to prerecorded questions. For example, the game presented players with 210 pairs of global positioning system coordinates and time codes, with no indications to what the locations referred to. The gameplay of I Love Bees tasked players around the world to work together to solve problems, with little or no direction or guidance. Suspecting that this was a mystery that could be unraveled, Halo and ARG fans spread the link and began to work on figuring out what was going on. Dana, the ostensible webmaster of the ilovebees site, created a weblog stating that something had gone wrong with her website, and the site itself had been hacked. The site, which appeared to be dedicated to honey sales and beekeeping, was covered in confusing random characters and sentence fragments. Д«oth events, not connected publicly for several weeks, caused the curious to visit the website. At around the same time, theatrical trailers for Halo 2 concluded with the Xbox logo and a URL,, that quickly flashed a link to, ostensibly a hacked site related to beekeeping. The jars contained letters leading to the I Love Bees website and a countdown. I Love Bees began when jars of honey were received in the mail by people who had previously participated in alternate reality games. I Love Bees won numerous awards for its innovation and helped spawn numerous other alternate reality games for video games.ДЄlternate reality games or ARGs are designed to involve fans of video games or other media in a form of viral marketing which CNET described as encompassing 'real-life treasure hunting, interactive storytelling, video games and online '. More than three million visitors viewed the site over the course of three months, and thousands of people around the world participated in the game. As players solved puzzles, audio logs were posted to the site which gradually revealed more of the fictional back-story, involving a marooned artificial intelligence stranded on Earth and its attempts to put itself back together.Дў50,000 people viewed the ilovebees website when it was launched in July 2004, and more than 500,000 returned to the site every time the pages were updated. I Love Bees was first advertised by a hidden message in a Halo 2 trailer players who investigated the titular website discovered that the pages appeared to be hacked by a mysterious intelligence. I Love Bees was commissioned by Microsoft, Halo 2 's publisher and Bungie's ultimate parent company at the time. Many of the same personnel had previously created an ARG for the film A.I. The game was created and developed by 42 Entertainment. I Love Bees (also known as ilovebees or ILB for short) was an alternate reality game (ARG) that served as both a real-world experience and viral marketing campaign for the release of developer Bungie's 2004 video game Halo 2.

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