What’s Mr Robot’s Endgame and hacking easter eggs from the tv show #MrRobot

Cyber security engineer by day, vigilante hacker by night.

Elliot Alderson is the lead character in the tv show Mr Robot, an expert at cyber security and dreams of saving the world. He gets persuaded by a person only known as Mr Robot to join fsociety, a small group of elite hackers who are trying to take down a mega-conglomerate called E Corp/Evil Corp.

Season 2 is currently airing on television and the writers of the show have hidden one or two easter eggs in each episode. See an IP address during an episode? Type it into a web browser and see where it goes. For example, 192.251.68.254 appeared in the first episode leading to a fake website that had been set up and there’s a full breakdown for this easter egg here. Another easter egg was a hand drawn QR code, which could be scanned and led to another website.

After each episode of Mr Robot appears on television, keen fans head over to reddit forums /r/mrRobot and /r/argSociety to discuss the latest easter eggs. This Google document lists most of the easter eggs that have appeared so far in the series.

Where do all the easter eggs lead?
Kor Adana, a writer and producer for Mr Robot mentioned in a recent article:

And there is an [final] endgame. In order to get the prize, which Adana says will be available at the end of season two, viewers will have to solve all of the Easter eggs. Even if someone has cracked 90 percent of the codes hidden within Mr. Robot, there is no way to figure out the final egg without completing all of the others. – Vulture

When Mr Robot’s Season 2 ends on September 14^th September 21st now, with episode twelve – expect the release of Endgame. What will it take to find the final easter egg?

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The world of Mr Robot doesn’t stop there:
– Web Game: There’s a 16 bit web-based game called Endgame already on the whoIsMrRobot website. It tests puzzle solving and moral dilemmas across four different levels. If you win a level, you get a certain number of chess pieces that appear on the side of the webpage. Interesting to note, fans have only been able to get 28 out of 32 chess pieces in the game so far.

My current theory is this game is going to lead fans into the release of the final Endgame (in reference to the Vulture article above!).

– Mobile App: Fans can get the app called – Mr.Robot:1.51exfiltrati0n.ipa – in the Google’s Play Store or Apple’s App Store for $2.99 USD and over a few days, players get text messages from in-game characters.

The backstory is you found a smart phone near an arcade place, on Coney Island in New York. That phone belongs to Darlene, a hacker who is going to commit a huge cybercrime and the player slowly becomes part of fsociety, the group who want to bring down E-Corp.

Telltale Games, the creators of the game have a behind-the-scenes video of how the game came together on Youtube.

– Novel: The companion novel, eps1.91_redwheelbarr0w.txt is a replica of the journal that Elliot records his thoughts in during Season 2. The book contains removable artifacts – parts of a newspaper, an envelope etc. and is released on November 1^st. Join the reddit forum – /r/MrRobotRWBook.

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What happened when the Season 2 trailer was released?
When Mr Robot’s Season 2 trailer was released, fans saw a phone number scrawled on the side of a cardboard box being labelled as evidence. Calling the number lead to a recorded voicemail and a short online puzzle hunt – here’s the Reddit post which details everything that went down.

In reference to the major hack near the end of Season 1, that happened on 5/09 (9th May) – the first 509 people who got to the end of the puzzle hunt and registered their details received a package from fsociety.

Thoughts
If this was done for the trailer, I’m hoping the release of Endgame at the end of Season 2 is going to be one epic online puzzle hunt.

It’s also been refreshing to see both the recent Gravity Falls ARG and Mr Robot’s current easter egg hunt and just fall down the rabbit hole for a new adventure.

And it shows that people don’t want to only watch entertainment – they want to be pulled into those worlds and play a role within them.

// Other Escape Room News
– The third Great Escape UK unconference will take place in Leeds, England on September 6th from 11am to 7pm. Check out ExExit Games’ post for further details.

Essa 🙂

Gotta catch ’em all! Nintendo and Google’s Niantic Labs release Pokemon Go – a new augmented reality game into the wild

There’s a serious Pokemon invasion and it’s only just started.

Pokemon Go, an augmented reality game was released last Wednesday to select countries. Players in Japan, America, Australia and New Zealand were among the lucky first to catch virtual Pokemon and live out their dream of becoming Pokemon Trainers.

The game has a staggered worldwide release and will next be available in the United Kingdom and The Netherlands as soon as the Pokemon Go team can put up more game servers to cope with the huge user demand for the game.

Pokemon are fictional animals which can be caught by throwing a Pokeball at it and over time, they can gain levels and evolve into new versions. Eventually Pokemon Trainers level up enough Pokemon to battle in the Pokemon League and to prove they are the greatest trainer of them all.

At level 5 in Pokemon Go, players can choose a team to align themselves with: Instinct (Yellow team), Mystic (Blue team) or Valour (Red team).

The world of Pokemon is overlaid onto the real world, so players must walk around to capture Pokemon or visit locations – PokeStops or Gyms, where players can stock up on eggs, Pokeballs or buy PokeCoins to help them get further through the game.

In under a week, the Pokemon Go game currently sits as the most popular game within the Google Play Store and iTunes App Store. It’s been mentioned the number of US Android users playing Pokemon Go will soon exceed the number of US Android users accessing Twitter or Tinder on their phones.

And it’s popularity doesn’t stop there, in Australia last weekend there have been Pokemon Go walks in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth with hundreds of people turning up to catch Pokemon. With more people around, the more likely Pokemon will spawn in the game.

It should come as no surprise that the mapping technology used in Pokemon Go has been harnessed from Niantic Lab’s earlier success – Ingress. People who played Ingress submitted location data of their gameplay via GPS and interesting landmarks became portals. From this, the portals of Ingress have become the PokeStops and Gyms within Pokemon Go.

“It turns out, Ingress plays a huge role in figuring that out. Major players of the earlier game contributed location data, or intel, to an online database, populating a worldwide map with various notable locations. That’s why Pokémon Go already knows the coolest places for you to check out in your local area, accompanied with photos.” – Polygon.

If you want to read more about the influence of Ingress on Pokemon Go, this is a good read.

Reports say Ingress has been downloaded 14 million times as of July 2016 and Pokemon Go is already well on its way to challenging this, with Google Play listing the number of downloads between 5 million to 10 million already.

Essa 🙂

Official Pokemon Go – Twitter