42 Entertainment are the wizards behind I Love Bees (which had me until it took a turn for the über-complicated/impossible to casually follow) for Microsoft’s Halo 2 and Year Zero for Nine In Nails, and you can read case-studies on their work at their site. These people, they don’t mess around. Other people mess around with viral. These guys don’t mess around. And even though I know what it is, I am still hooked. Here’s what went down; consider it a recap of “so far”:

A few days back random people in comic shops, presumably on the coasts (where everything happens), start dropping playing cards. Just Joker cards. And they look like this:

Okay, now these are trash to 95+% of the population. Especially since they were not handed out, but actually tossed on the ground. They contain the URL for IBelieveInHarveyDentToo.com.

What does that mean? A few days prior to these cards hitting the floor, the Dark Knight website launched. Click on the icon and it shows you the image at the top of this story. Now if you like movies, comics, or any combination thereof, chances are you knew about this page. Harvey Dent, for the few non-Billy Dee Williams fans in the audience, is the District Attorney who becomes the villainous Two Face. Now add in those playing cards, and something interesting developed. All it takes is one person to follow through and these things catch like wildfire in the world of Web 2.0.

Ack. I can’t believe I’m actually typing “the world of Web 2.0.” Street cred -50.

This page, which does not redirect to warnerbros.com, kicks off the game proper. At one point, it asked you to fill in your email address, and gave the following message:

When someone checked their email they found a message and a link from tragicpast@ibelieveinharveydenttoo.com reading “I always say, you never know what a man is truly made of until you peel the skin off his face one piece at a time.” Click the link, and a single pixel of the defaced harvey Dent poster converts itself into another image. One pixel.

News spreads quickly in the modern world, and once a few people figured out what was going on, they got that word out. Nerds everywhere mobilized in droves and soon we got out big reveal: The Joker.

Oh of course I’m not going to show it to you! I’m not one of those people that spoils movies for people when they least expect it, or even if they totally expect it. If you want to see it so bad, google it. You’ll find it right quick. But you can’t see it on ibelieveinharveydenttoo.com anymore, because that’s been taken down. All you get now is an error message.

But wait now. Rule number one in viral marketing/ARGs is:nothing is as it seems. Select all the text and…

Nice. The photo came down after less than a day and if you weren’t looking you might think Warner Brothers put the kibosh on a leaked image. But then you’d miss the send off.

Or did you still miss the send off? Pulling a trick I’ve pulled myself a dozen times since college, there’s a message hidden there. O.n.e. l.e.t.t.e.r. a.t. a. t.i.m.e. My first clue was this sore thumb:

Now it would take a keen eye to spot all of these in the never-ending sea of “Ha ha hA’s” so intrepid readers like myself copy and paste all that text into InDesign (sure, maybe some people use Word but as a designer I cannot bring myself to) and pull a “Find and Replace” to switch all of those “Ha’s” into spaces. 1,708 replacements later, we get this:

see YOu In DECeMbER.

Nice. Now, thoughts are pointing to December being some sort of a release date for a trailer for The Dark Knight, but I’d like to believe it’s something more. A plot point? A continuation of the game? Who knows? The last entry I have available right now is that 42 Entertainment has supposedly registered seeyouindecember.com as of yesterday, so something may pop up again between now and December. I for one hope something does, as this entire scenario played itself out in such short order—too short, for my tastes. Because after so much care was taken to disguise the owner of the domain name “ibelieveinharveydenttoo” for the first site, it is hard to believe they’d just give up the game now and show all their cards.

I love this stuff. And I can’t wait to see what happens next.