The Lost Experience

From Lostpedia

This information was revealed in part through the alternate reality game
The LOST Experience

Clues · Revelations · Sponsorship · Websites

Characters:		Rachel Blake · Alvar Hanso · Thomas Mittelwerk · DJ Dan · Enzo Valenzetti · Other...
Themes:		Hanso Foundation · DHARMA · Valenzetti Equation · Sri Lanka Video · Apollo Candy · Other...

For Lost Experience clues detailed in-depth, see The Lost Experience clues

The Lost Experience (TLE) was an alternate reality game (ARG) designed by the writers and producers of Lost to engage fans and expand the storyline. It was the first Lost ARG, although it was preceded by ABC marketing department's viral marketing website oceanic-air.com. The Lost Experience began in May 2006 during the broadcast of the last few episodes of Season 2 in the United States and the UK (and mid-season in Australia), and ran through the hiatus until just before the start of Season 3. It was followed in 2008 by a smaller-scale ARG called Find 815, between the end of Season 3 and the beginning of Season 4.

The Lost Experience was co-developed by three TV companies, America's ABC, Australia's Channel Seven and the United Kingdom's Channel Four. The writer of The Lost Experience has been identified as Jordan Rosenberg by Carlton Cuse. [1] All in-game websites (with the exception of the sponsor sites) were developed by UK Design Agency Hi-ReS! [2], who had previously created the Lost The Untold site for United Kingdom's Channel Four.

According to a New York Times article, the game would be "a multimedia treasure hunt that makes use of e-mail messages, phone calls, commercials, billboards and fake Web sites that are made to seem real." The Lost Experience was created by the show's actual writers and will progress the storyline.

The Lost Experience was internet-based and featured a parallel story line that was not part of the TV show. There were no winning prizes, but the Experience claimed to offer clues that could unlock some of the island's many secrets. It included the introduction of new characters and the mysterious Hanso Foundation. Clues were varied by continent, so participants would benefit from coordinating their information via the internet. ABC said the game was designed to appeal to both fans and people unfamiliar with Lost.

Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse first mentioned the ARG in the official podcast that the Hanso Foundation website, which was offline for several months (or in their words, "down for remodeling").

1 International launch dates
2 Official Channel Four video
3 Summary
4 Timeline
5 Necessary tools
6 Looking back
7 Sequel
8 Remaining questions
9 On the web

International launch dates

The launch of the game coincided with various episodes of Lost.

May 2, 2006 in the United Kingdom, coinciding with the episode "Man of Science, Man of Faith".
May 3, 2006 in the United States, coinciding with the episode "Two for the Road".
May 4, 2006 in Australia, coinciding with the episode "The Hunting Party"
- (Advert was repeated 11 May in "Fire + Water")
May 15, 2006 in the Republic of Ireland, coinciding with the episode "One of Them"

Official Channel Four video

Channel Four released a short four minute documentary on the Lost Experience and their involvement:

Summary

The game had been broken down into distinct stages, with a separate objective in each. Reports suggested it would consist of five stages (i.e. this press release).

Stage 1

Bad Twin, the Lost tie-in novel written by Gary Troup

The first stage of the game centred around the "official" Hanso Foundation website and involved players in discovering clues hidden within the site left by a hacker known only at the time as Persephone. These clues cast doubt on the Foundation's claims of benevolence towards the human race, and introduced other characters in the game. This stage of the game was promoted by Hanso Foundation Commercials airing on ABC, Channel 7, and Channel 4, as well as cosponsorship deals with Sprite, Jeep, Verizon, and Monster.com. Additionally, a conspiracy-minded radio host DJ Dan joined Persephone's fight against Hanso.

A tie-in novel, Bad Twin, was published in May 2006 under the fictitious author Gary Troup, who (in the show) was aboard Oceanic Flight 815 and whose manuscript was discovered by Hurley, read by Sawyer, and burned (at least partially) by Jack. Video interviews with Troup were scattered across the web, containing references to Troup's out-of-print "nonfiction" book The Valenzetti Equation. The exact relationship of the novel's story to that of Lost isn't clear, but the timing of the book's publication, as well as the 'scavenger hunt' sensibility of the interview clips, suggests that Troup and Bad Twin were another piece of The Lost Experience puzzle.

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Stage 2

Darla Taft with Hugh McIntyre

The second stage of the game began with the shutdown of thehansofoundation.org in response to Persephone's hacking. A URL hidden in the sourcecode of the site forwarded players to the blog of Rachel Blake, a seemingly innocuous journal concerning her travels around Europe. However, when entering a secret code into the blog, another site was revealed: Rachel's real site, http://stophanso.rachelblake.com. This site featured a video blog of her attempts to discover the truth about the Hanso Foundation's operations, and expose their sinister deeds by tracking down the executives in Europe, especially mastermind Thomas Werner Mittelwerk.

Through the course of the stage, players learned that Rachel Blake and Persephone were one and the same. Players also found that the Foundation, now under the sole management of "Dr." Mittelwerk, was involved in suspicious activities in Iceland, using their Vik Institute to secretly run the Valenzetti Equation using a group of autistic savants.

Blake followed Mittelwerk to Italy, where he boarded the container transport Helgus Antonius, bound for Sri Lanka. Blake was assisted by Darla Taft, a Hanso associate who discovered some of their questionable dealings. She and her lover Hugh McIntyre were killed, presumably on Mittelwerk's orders, but left Rachel instructions on how to follow Mittelwerk to Sri Lanka with the assistance of the mysterious Malik.

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Stage 3

The Sri Lanka Video was seen in Stage 3

The third stage of the game was announced at the 2006 San Diego Comic Con during the Lost Q&A panel where Rachel Blake stood up and accused the show's creators of conspiring with the Hanso Foundation. Near the end of her irate speech she intstructed for all who "want the truth" to go to hansoexposed.com.

Stage 3 was based around piecing together of the video Blake filmed while in Sri Lanka that was to "tear the Hanso Foundation apart." The video showed Mittelwerk talking to a small group of people, announcing his and the Foundation's plans, presumably for the Spider Protocol. In the course of his speech, Mittelwerk showed an orientation video from 1975 narrated by Alvar Hanso, explaining the origins and purpose of the DHARMA Initiative, the Valenzetti Equation, and the island. Blake had gone into temporary hiding, placing glyphs online, in advertisements, and via podcasts to find each of the 70 parts of the video that, when arranged in the right order, showed the video in its entirety. The final glyph was found on September 8, 2006, (9/08/06, to be precise - 9+8+6=23) making the video complete.

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Stage 4

Apollo Candy Bars were a part of the Lost Experience

Stage 4 was the whereisalvar.com Apollo Bar hunt. This stage overlapped with Stage 3. The stage began on August 23, 2006 and ended on September 18.

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Stage 5

Stage 5 was the finale of The Lost Experience. It came in the form of a DJ Dan podcast and a final video from Rachel Blake on September 24, 2006. The video showed Alvar Hanso talking to Rachel. He revealed that he was her father, that Mittelwerk was keeping him prisoner and was behind all the atrocities. This press release confirms this. On the September 25th, thehansofoundation.org was updated with final messages from both Alvar Hanso and Thomas Mittelwerk. Some of the players behind the game also came forward and revealed their identities, although this probably isn't an official part of Stage 5.

Timeline

Main Article:The Lost Experience Timeline

Necessary tools

Giveaway dates & places

Phone line
Internet connection
Web browser
Google, Wikipedia and Lostpedia bookmarks
Capacity for critical thinking
Adobe PhotoShop or equivalent, and knowledge of how to use it.
Anagram-solving skills
ASCII converter
Working knowledge of trigonometry
Familiarity with classical mythology, Bible
Korean-language fluency
Subscriptions to People Magazine and Entertainment Weekly
Ability to travel to locations in Sydney, Los Angeles, and various locations for Apollo Candy giveaways
Vigenère decoder

Note: These are the tools used by the The Lost Experience community to solve the puzzles. The expectation was not that one individual working alone could or would solve all the clues by themselves. To see all the clues found during the Experience, see The Lost Experience clues.

Looking back

Buddy.tv: One thing that’s a bit of controversy in the fan community is whether or not any of the information from The Lost Experience game is actually a factor in the universe of the show. Is that something you could clear up for us?

Carlton Cuse says the internet was a way to reveal information regarding Lost

Carlton Cuse: I think that for us, yeah, I mean, all of Alvar Hanso and his relationship with funding the DHARMA Initiative is part of the mythology. The details of the Hanso Foundation’s demise…it’s tangential to the show but it’s not unrelated to the show. We sort of felt like the Internet Experience was a way for us to get out mythologies that we would never get to in the show. I mean, because this is mythology that doesn’t have an effect on the character’s lives or existence on the island. We created it for purposes of understanding the world of the show but it was something that was always going to be sort of below the water, sort of the iceberg metaphor, and the Internet Experience sort of gave us a chance to reveal it.

Damon Lindelof: I would say in terms of all the… background that we did, in terms of the Valenzetti equation and explaining the formation of the Hanso Foundation and doing the other films…we’d consider that stuff canon to the show. Where there’d have to be wiggle room is the Rachel Blake story where she’s in the real world, in the outside world as we define it, the show Lost might be defined in an entirely different outside world so we can’t vouch for the overall fit ability and veracity of everything that Rachel was doing. But we can say that all the factoids that she was uncovering were vetted, in fact many of them were written by us personally so they are canon.

BuddyTV: Is there going to be another Lost Experience at some point? Will those characters be revisited?

Carlton Cuse: I don’t think those characters would be revisited. As to whether there’s going to be another Lost Experience, there’s been discussions about it and I think it would only happen if we found another story that again, felt like it was worth telling but that we weren’t going to get around to telling it on the mother ship.

Sequel

Jamie Silberhartz

Talks of a sequel to The Lost Experience have up until recently been quashed by both the writing team and actors involved. Entertainment Weekly's Doc Jensen wrote in January 2007 that "I'm told [the game] WON'T be making a return appearance during the next summer/fall hiatus". [3] In April 2007, Jamie Silberhartz, who played main protagonist Rachel Blake, stated that she had heard nothing about a sequel. However, she did say that she would be willing to return "in a heartbeat" if the decision was made to continue the project. [4]

In this topic on The Fuselage forums, Gregg Nations said that there will not be another ARG, because of lack of sponsorship. However, it should be noted that his wording is "this time round", suggesting that there could be a continuation of the game during a future hiatus. Also, the fact that he says it has been difficult to find sponsors implies that the writing team are interested in furthering the narrative.

At Comic Con 2007, it was confirmed by the writing team that there would be no Lost Experience during the Season 3-4 hiatus, but that it was "looking good" for continuation in some way during next year's hiatus instead. They also stated that they were in discussion about "a couple of book deals" that would tie into the mythology of the show directly.

On December 31, 2007, confirmation of a new Lost ARG emerged beginning with a press release from ABC claiming Oceanic Airlines was returning to business. flyoceanicair.com was established as the starting point for a new game called Find 815. This ARG was more straightforward than The Lost Experience, more cinematic, and lasted for five weeks until Season 4 began airing. Its story centered around Sam Thomas, a former Oceanic employee whose girlfriend Sonya was a flight attendant on Oceanic Flight 815, whose search for answers leads to a crew position on a salvage expedition to discover the shipwreck of the Black Rock.

Remaining questions

Spider Protocol is still a mystery

What was the Spider Protocol?
Where are the last 2 clips of Gary Troup's book interview (though stated by Javier Grillo-Marxuach as an accidental red herring)?
Is Enzo Valenzetti alive as Rachel suspected, and if so where is he now, and why did he fake his own death?
Were there significant reasons for why the Foundation was illegally harvesting organs in third world nations for their research facilities, or was this purely a device to add the idea of corruption to the Foundation's image as part of the storyline?
Why did the Hanso Foundation plan to release a controlled virus in Sri Lanka to help them solve the Valenzetti equation, and why was a death rate of 30% so imperative that any more or less would mean failure?
How did Rachel Blake's mother die, what was her illness (which the doctors kept from Rachel, causing her to hack their records), and why did Alvar Hanso launch the Mental Health Appeal (which Malick said was set up to "save a loved one")?
What was the abnormalities in Alvar Hanso's bloodwork that were hinted at by Dr. Eliza Vasquez, and why did Mittelwerk undergo a full blood transfusion before going to Sri Lanka?
What significance, if any, was the Project Sumo subplot during the game to the overall narrative?
Why was the Missing Organs folder storyline set months before the actual game? Was it the impetus for Rachel's quest to destroy the Foundation (aside from wanting to meet her father)?

On the web

Main Article:List of websites

The Homepage of Thehansofoundation.org

Retrieversoftruth.com's homepage

Confirmed in-game websites

Gary Troup's website, mostly about Bad Twin - http://www.garytroup.net and http://www.garytroupbooks.com
The Hanso Foundation - http://www.thehansofoundation.org

Persephone.thehansofoundation.org (subsection)
Hole2.thehansofoundation.org (subsection)
Hole3.thehansofoundation.org (subsection)
Hole4.thehansofoundation.org (subsection)

Game-affiliated websites

Speaker hosted The Inside the Experience Blog

These were sites that are not necessarily part of the game universe, but do connect the players to the puppetmasters. These sites provided subtle guidance (such as confirmations of sites that are out of game) and the occasional product push, but would remain "in character" at all times. They appeared to all exist as part of the Websites of the networks that broadcasted Lost in major international media markets (the US, the UK and Australia, so far).