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07-10-2015, 03:12 PM
(This post was last modified: 09-01-2022, 01:04 AM by Fearless Community.
Edit Reason: Fixed Encoding
)
About 7 years ago I had just gotten my Xbox 360 and was a massive fan of the Halo franchise. So naturally when the RTS game 'Halo Wars' came out I got it (ended up buying it off a kid on the bus for $4 which was a steal since the game came out 2 days prior). It was a solid RTS, not the best but definitely had good mechanics and gameplay. For many years now myself and others have waited for a sequel and after recent teases from Microsoft I hatched a plan.
8 months ago I decided to create a fake teaser site for 'Halo Wars 2' to generate a buzz among the community and show that there was ample support for the idea. I drew up a site design in Photoshop, copied the coding and styling from a Microsoft page (for authenticity to those who looked), and spent some time copying the page over. This was the final result (with an active countdown): http://frontierr.net/thehalowars/index.html
To make the whole plan a bit more elaborate I purchased the domain thehalowars.com, which guess what? It used to be owned by Microsoft but they ended up only using halowars.com and let the domain expired. So the first few weeks when people looked up the domain registry they saw it not only registered to Microsoft but being hosted by their name servers as well dating back to 2007.
Check Twitter for the hashtags #SpiritofFire and #HaloWars2 dating back to around mid-November and you'll see that the Twitter link I posted blew up as well:
[Image: iU7RU.png]
And news sites bought it up as well: http://www.windowscentral.com/halo-wars-...-you-think
Before the timer was able to finish though I closed the website since Microsoft had responded to one site's emails saying they were "just as surprised" by the new site and that they had their legal team on it. I saved them the trouble.
All and all it was a fun creative project and showed that there's a massive Halo Wars community awaiting a sequel, a win my book.
8 months ago I decided to create a fake teaser site for 'Halo Wars 2' to generate a buzz among the community and show that there was ample support for the idea. I drew up a site design in Photoshop, copied the coding and styling from a Microsoft page (for authenticity to those who looked), and spent some time copying the page over. This was the final result (with an active countdown): http://frontierr.net/thehalowars/index.html
To make the whole plan a bit more elaborate I purchased the domain thehalowars.com, which guess what? It used to be owned by Microsoft but they ended up only using halowars.com and let the domain expired. So the first few weeks when people looked up the domain registry they saw it not only registered to Microsoft but being hosted by their name servers as well dating back to 2007.
Check Twitter for the hashtags #SpiritofFire and #HaloWars2 dating back to around mid-November and you'll see that the Twitter link I posted blew up as well:
[Image: iU7RU.png]
And news sites bought it up as well: http://www.windowscentral.com/halo-wars-...-you-think
Before the timer was able to finish though I closed the website since Microsoft had responded to one site's emails saying they were "just as surprised" by the new site and that they had their legal team on it. I saved them the trouble.
All and all it was a fun creative project and showed that there's a massive Halo Wars community awaiting a sequel, a win my book.