Valenzetti - Premise

Premise

The game is divided into five phases. The first began on May 2, 2006 in the United Kingdom, May 3, 2006 in the United States and Australia, with a television commercial that aired during an episode of Lost for the fictional Hanso Foundation, a corporation mentioned on the television show. The advertisement listed a telephone number which brought up fictional voice mail lines for employees at the Hanso Foundation. Some of these messages provided clues to be used in the Hanso Foundation's website. Commercials for the Hanso Foundation in subsequent weeks directed players to other in-game websites, some of which are tied to specific sponsors, as detailed below.

Several different websites for fictional organizations or individuals mentioned on the show or in part of the Lost Experience were introduced. The websites, particularly the Hanso Foundation website, contain background information into the mythology of Lost. The character Rachel Blake (Jamie Silberhartz), also known as Persephone, is introduced to guide players through the game. Most clues on the Hanso Foundation website are revealed by clicking on faintly marked anomalies in the web page design or by entering specific codes into webpages. Some require passwords found elsewhere, such as in the voicemail service. The clue revelations are designed as minigames, though with little challenge as they are completely linear. A notable exception are the coded messages on persephone.thehansofoundation.org, involving simple encryption schemes such as ROT13 and base64.

Also in May, Hyperion published the novel Bad Twin, a book written by Laurence Shames and credited to fictional author Gary Troup, who was on the plane that crashed on Lost. Bad Twin is a mystery novel that contains references to the show and mentions the Hanso Foundation occasionally. On May 9, various newspapers ran quarter-page ads from the Hanso Foundation which condemned the novel for giving misinformation about the Hanso Foundation. Of note is the fact that "Gary Troup" is in fact an anagram of the word "purgatory" itself, indicating that the book may itself be a red herring as the purgatory theory has been refuted.

On June 19, Rachel Blake's blog is revealed in the source code of the Hanso foundation site, which comes to play a major part of the second phase of the game. Rogue investigator Blake posts videos of her traveling around the world (mostly Europe) to uncover the secret agenda of the Hanso foundation.

hansoexposed.com is launched through a stunt at Comic-Con on July 22, 2006, marking the start of the Lost Experience phase three. The website (which was identified earlier as sharing IP address with thehansofoundation.org) features open-registration accounts to a video sequence editor. By entering alphanumeric codes new video segments can be added. New codes are expected to be released regularly — entering an invalid code yields a statement that the code in question does not work at this particular time.

In late August 2006, Apollo chocolate bars (the Apollo bar is a part of the Lost mythology and has been featured onscreen) began distribution through Forbidden Planet stores in the UK, and visits by an Apollo truck in the US. On August 24 the web site was launched. Site users may upload pictures of themselves and Apollo chocolate bars they have been issued. The uploaded pictures now form the word "unite". A certain number of Apollo bars are designated "golden oracle", and contain special codes that can also be submitted to the site. A message from Rachel Blake promises that further instructions will be given "once enough of the world is watching". Finally, the site reported that D.J. Dan would tell the full truth and finally shut down the whole thing on his radio show on September 24 at 8pm PST.

Fans of Lost had been looking over the clues and discussing them on internet forums, and several websites were set up giving detailed information on all parts of the game. Since the focus was on the Web (as opposed to broadcast), the intentionally low-fi nature of some Lost Experience material and its use of consumer-oriented distribution channels such as Blogger, Flickr, and YouTube, made it particularly difficult to separate fan-made material from the official canon.