Ethan Haas Was Right

Ethan Haas Was Right (EHWR) is a viral marketing campaign developed by Mind Storm Labs to promote its role-playing game Alpha Omega: The Beginning and The End. It involves an apocalypse taking place in the near future, and those who will band together to survive it and those who bring it down upon this world. The game received publicity online after it was erroneously connected with the J. J. Abrams film, Cloverfield.

The game consists of a series of Flash puzzles, all concerning a giant sphere that changes shape as each one is solved. Behind the sphere, a city skyline at night is visible. As one completes the puzzles, the image progressively changes to that of a destroyed city.

Over the main screen, stars are visible, and more appear as the puzzles progress. The leftmost and rightmost star are available from the beginning. The left one, which is glowing blue, will activate one's mail program with the address filled in; sending an email to this address originally resulted in an automated reply giving several tips on how to solve the puzzles; but in mid-July this message was changed to a more cryptic message (see below). The right one, when hovered over, will display 26 symbols that correspond to the alphabet and will be required in two of the puzzles. Solving puzzles will also treat visitors to videos that are somewhat damaged and difficult to comprehend.

The online marketing strategy was designed by Orlando-based Mind Storm Labs using characters and story borrowed from their role playing game Alpha Omega: The Beginning and The End. The website for Ethan Haas Was Right was developed by the Los Angeles-based interactive shop, RED Interactive Agency.

There are several characters who are assumed, for the purposes of the game, to be real people. Established characters are as follows.

A man who once foretold the coming destruction of the world; he had visions and was thought of as a prophet who recorded what he saw. He is now presumed to have been dead for a long time. No current significance has been attached to his name.

According to the official Alpha Omega game website, Haas was a 19th-century Parisian author, virtually unknown to the public. His book, The Wheel and Other Stories, was dismissed as fiction. He vanished after the book's publication. But as the centuries progressed, the public accepted Haas as a prophet.

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Wikipedia