In Popular Culture
The video game Portal, in an internet update of the program files three years after its original release, provided in-game radio objects, whose sound effects became part of an alternate reality game-style analysis by fans of the game hinting at a sequel of the game - the effects included Morse code strings that implied the restarting of a computer system, and could be decoded as SSTV images from a grainy video. These images included further hints of a BBS phone number that when accessed, provided a large number of ANSI-based images relating to the game and its potential sequel. The sequel, Portal 2, was later confirmed.
In the aforementioned sequel, Portal 2, more SSTV images are broadcast in Rattman dens. When decoded, these images are pictures concerning elements of the game, such as the Weighted Companion Cube on the moon, and slides with bullet points on how the aforementioned ARG was done and what the outcome was, such as how long it took the combined internet to solve the puzzle.
Read more about this topic: Slow-scan Television
Famous quotes containing the words popular and/or culture:
“That popular fable of the sot who was picked up dead-drunk in the street, carried to the duke’s house, washed and dressed and laid in the duke’s bed, and, on his waking, treated with all obsequious ceremony like the duke, and assured that he had been insane, owes its popularity to the fact that it symbolizes so well the state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but now and then wakes up, exercises his reason and finds himself a true prince.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The local is a shabby thing. There’s nothing worse than bringing us back down to our own little corner, our own territory, the radiant promiscuity of the face to face. A culture which has taken the risk of the universal, must perish by the universal.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)