A Project Blackstone website went live today, hosted on Blizzard's Battle.net network. The website, which falls short of an ARG, provided a password prompt with the password handily provided in the page's source code. Inside the site shows an email conversation welcoming a team of scientists to Project Blackstone and leads to eleven different Twitter accounts. Oh boy, this is only the beginning, isn't it?
As for what game this ARG is for, one can only guess. There are Terran logos on the website and references to Zerg and Protoss, so a StarCraft association is quite obvious. Still, there's practically no other relation to StarCraft II's upcoming Heart of the Swarm expansion to be found. At this point, the safe bet would be assume it's just an advertising campaign for the expansion, but perhaps there's something more going on here...
According to the details found in the Project Blackstone introductory email, from one Dr. Helek Branamoor, multiple scientists from the top of their respective fields have been brought together. And by brought together I mean collected against their will, at least in one case. Many, if not all, of the scientists have Twitter accounts, which are being used as if they're intra-office communications. Kind of silly, yet kind of clever. They're each getting starter working on... something. Something very interesting, likely.
The eleven Twitter accounts reveal very little, beyond the teams professions -- which include Zerg and Protoss experts, xenobiologists, engineers, explosions experts and more. Apparently the Twitter conversation for Project Blackstone started a week ago, but we're only now able to begin to catch up. Check out the full conversation, organized by a Redditor, here.
Visit the Project Blackstone website on your own and login with the password "Y7_$0>0k_3<$m", which leads to the emails. And of course, look forward to StarCraft II and its Heart of the Swarm expansion on March 12. We'll keep you updated on any events related to Project Blackstone as they happen. I'd like to hope that this may be another game in the works, like the defunct Ghost project, but I won't hold my breath.