AriBanks

Before DeviantArt Eclipse would be revealed to the world (or even officially named!), the Marketing team was already contemplating how to publicize it. What could we do that was exciting, fun, and community-oriented...while not being able to reveal anything about what we were promoting? The answer came from our bucket list: an ARG! “When we were initially brainstorming, we threw around a ton of crazy ideas, but we kept coming back to an idea of having something mysterious and fun for the community to solve that would reveal DeviantArt Eclipse,” said @danlev. “We've done puzzles and scavenger hunts in the past and they've always been pretty popular. We kept playing around with ideas and our ideas became more and more elaborate until we realized that we should develop a whole storyline, characters, and a bunch of puzzles.” “I love puzzles and stories and adventure and secrets, so an ARG was right up my alley,’ said @mattbmattb, our Puzzle Master. “I was OBSESSED with watching people

Now that we've got proper distance from the Ari Banks ARG (Alternate Reality Game), I thought that I'd go through all the puzzles of the ARG for those that may be curious. I had a blast being a part of the team, and loved putting together some challenges to figure out. A lot of work was done by @MisfitsTamara and @bironicheroine building the character, the journals, and more. I could not have done any of this without them. The way to "Win" the ARG was to lock away all the Djinn that escape. To lock most of them away requires several steps: Figure out the unique "key" for the djinn, a six-character code Search for that key on DeviantArt Put the :Eclipse: emoji on that post Some varied from that, but here's basically the steps we went through: Any good ARG has to at least be interesting. So, we made an awesome character and brought in artist @Iamjustino to create a five-panel comic to kick things off. Through this, our goal was to introduce our heroes, Ari Banks and Bunny, along