Hundreds of thousands of teenage girls descended on a remote area of Saskatchewan on Tuesday, in preparation for the finale of the popular, complex Alternate Reality Game promoting the movie “Bratz.”
The ARG began over six months ago, when the Bratz trailer was first screened before “Kickin’ It Old Skool” with Jamie Kennedy.
“Stacy and I loved the part where the mean girl was thrown in the pool and screamed ‘You Bratz!’” said 13-year old Ashley Richardson. “Then a phrase flashed on the screen, and I said, ‘oh my god, I think that was Ancient Sumerian.’”
Decoding the message lead the two, and millions of other young girls, into a complex web of mysterious websites, numerological puzzles, and painstaking analysis of DNA/RNA patterns. The community started collaborative MySpace groups and donated the use of billions of supercomputer time cycles. The resulting plaintext, once translated from the Aramaic, told the story of Heather, a fish-out-of-water young girl plunked into a new stepfamily where no one understood her.
“I remember when we solved the Orion Belt puzzle, and it led us to a Forever 21 website with a coupon for 10% off,” said 14-year old Lindsey McDonald. “I was crushed, but then Becky said to look more closely at the cute knit top with the strange black and white pattern.”
“It was the Fibonacci sequence, only with every third number removed,” Lindsey said. “Chapter Three had just begun.”
Legal filings obtained by players with Lawyer Daddies point to a mysterious organization known as the DollMasters behind the Game, which has been nicknamed “Red Dog” by avid players.
The recent resolution of the SETI puzzle led players to a simple webpage with a set of GPS coordinates pointing to Northern Canada and a timer countdown.
“We think it’ll finally resolve if Heather dates her best friend or abandons him for the hot-but-mean football player,” said a shivering Rory Tesota. “Or maybe it’ll just lead us down this rabbit hole a little deeper.”
