Ethan Haas Was Right


Ethan Haas Was Right is a viral marketing campaign developed by Mind Storm Labs to promote its role-playing game Alpha Omega: The Beginning and The End. It involves an apocalypse taking place in the near future, and those who will band together to survive it and those who bring it down upon this world. The game received publicity online after it was erroneously connected with the J. J. Abrams film Cloverfield.
The game consists of a series of Flash puzzles, all concerning a giant sphere that changes shape as each one is solved. Behind the sphere, a city skyline at night is visible. As one completes the puzzles, the image progressively changes to that of a destroyed city.
Over the main screen, stars are visible, and more appear as the puzzles progress. The leftmost and rightmost star are available from the beginning. The left one, which is glowing blue, will activate one's mail program with the address filled in; sending an email to this address originally resulted in an automated reply giving several tips on how to solve the puzzles; but in mid-July this message was changed to a more cryptic message. The right one, when hovered over, will display 26 symbols that correspond to the alphabet and will be required in two of the puzzles. Solving puzzles will also treat visitors to videos that are somewhat damaged and difficult to comprehend.

Design

The online marketing strategy was designed by Orlando-based Mind Storm Labs using characters and story borrowed from their role playing game Alpha Omega: The Beginning and The End. The website for Ethan Haas Was Right was developed by the Los Angeles-based interactive shop, RED Interactive Agency.

Characters

There are several characters who are assumed, for the purposes of the game, to be real people. Established characters are as follows.

Ethan Haas

A man who once foretold the coming destruction of the world; he had visions and was thought of as a prophet who recorded what he saw. He is now presumed to have been dead for a long time. No current significance has been attached to his name.
According to the official Alpha Omega game website, Haas was a 19th-century Parisian author, virtually unknown to the public. His book, The Wheel and Other Stories, was dismissed as fiction. He vanished after the book's publication. But as the centuries progressed, the public accepted Haas as a prophet.
Coincidentally and completely unrelated, Ethan Haas is also the name of the character first seen in The Class, a CBS sitcom starring Lizzy Caplan, who was in Cloverfield.

Van Mantra

Mantra, the only character so far that players have been able to actually see, is a student of Haas's teachings; he apparently found the writings of Haas, and began to believe them as he saw predictions come true.
In the videos, Mantra appears in a dark setting, so it is difficult to make out much of his appearance or surroundings. Adding to the mystery surrounding him, Mantra's name may be a pseudonym.
Mantra is the one who established the website, creating it as a test for those seeking to learn of Haas' prophecies, and leaving video recordings for those who completed the puzzles. In organizing the website, however, Mantra appears to be organizing a resistance/survivors group, after most of the known world meets its end.
He has also sent out emails to those who used an address found on the website asking for help; after a certain amount of time, personalized help-mails stopped, and only an automatic response was sent, with a generic list of clues. Personalized emails continued intermittently, for instance in response to an inquiry about a purported Ethan Haas profile on MySpace, which Mantra dismissed.

The Mezin

The Mezin is a group of some kind, the details of which are not yet known. They are staunchly opposed to the teachings of Haas, and to the activities of Van Mantra, to the point where they hacked the outgoing message on Van Mantra's voice mail, prompting Van Mantra to go even deeper underground than before. It has recently been alluded that the Mezin may have captured Van Mantra.

Triton Enterprises

Triton Enterprises is a company reported to be run by the Mezin and is connected to the EHWR website. This becomes evident in the properties of the PDF file found on the Triton Enterprises website. The facility is currently on lockdown after some kind of crisis.

Emails

From Triton Enterprises entitled " Temporary Security Measures":
Personalized emails are also reported to have been received from Triton regarding request for interviews and employment.

Kellie Graham

Kellie Graham is an employee of Triton Enterprises and if someone emails the Triton Enterprises information email they will receive an automatic email from the company signed by her. However, she also has her own company email which when emailed sends out a plea for assistance as of August 1.
From Kellie Graham's company email entitled "Help us!":
The "him" mentioned in the email may be Van Mantra. If she is working for a company owned by the Mezin it is likely she would believe that he was insane for talking about the prophecies of Ethan Haas. However, Kellie seems to have come to believe him based on this and the hidden message in the PDF file on the Triton website.
Now, if you email her, this is her response:
From Kellie Graham's company email entitled "The end is near":

Puzzles

The text of an automated email from Mantra, also found in a hidden help section of ethanhaaswasright.com, offering the following message:

Videos

Each video plays after the corresponding puzzle is solved, and can be paused, or stopped to go back to the main part of the site. The videos can be accessed again by clicking on the stars that appear after solving each puzzle.
The videos are also available on YouTube.

Van's emails

The following email was recently sent to visitors seeking help through emailing Van at the Haas site:
Another Email is sent when your email the address given on the website with "54312" which is the numbers flashed in the fourth video. The email reads:
The number sequence "279fh7691" leads to one of the three letters.

Divinus

Upon completing all five puzzles and watching all five videos, a sixth form of the sphere appears, as a tablet with greenery growing around it in contrast to the destroyed city behind it. Across the top of the tablet is the word 'Divinus'. It has an input for Name and Email, with a submit button that says 'Remind Me', citing the date of the 1st of August, referencing the fifth video which lists August 1 as an important date to meet back at the EHWR website. Presumably, entering one's email will prompt a reminder to revisit the site closer to the 1st, though the exact purpose of this is not yet known for sure.
In addition to the Divinus tablet, upon completing the puzzles, several other changes occur to the setting. There are now seven stars across the skyline— the leftmost, blue star still gives access to the automated email with hints, while the rightmost still brings up the alternate alphabet. The other five show the five videos seen after completing each puzzle, with the first white star on the left accessing the first video, the second accessing the second, etc.
Finally, a panel appears on the right-hand side of the screen, with six panels, each bearing a reduced image of the sphere in its six forms. Clicking on a corresponding panel will take you to a puzzle or the Divinus tablet. This is for replay value only, and will not force you to complete all of the puzzles again to reach this point.
On August 2 the following message appears on the website:
The Time Has Come...
Ethan Haas' message has been heard by millions. The war is coming but now we are united and ready. Forces are aligning against us, ancient powers who have laid in wait for centuries waiting for a chance to plunge the world into ruin. But now is our chance - I have found a safe place where we can rally together to prepare for the coming storm. Now is the time to choose what role you will play.
Are you ready?
NO I will need to hear the warnings first
YES show me what lies ahead for us all

If NO is selected, it takes the reader to the 5 puzzles; if YES is chosen, the reader is redirected to the game's website.

Cloverfield connection

Although they were incorrect in the end, many speculated that EHWR was connected to the Paramount-produced movie, "Cloverfield". This claim was supported by the similar themes of the viral marketing campaign and the trailer; as well, Paramount removed videos of the Cloverfield trailer, as well as videos concerning EHWR, suggesting that they had legal rights to both, which led many players to believe the two were connected. This, however, could have been because many Van Mantra videos were labeled as "Cloverfield Video" or "Ethan Haas-Cloverfield", making it probable that YouTube merely removed the videos due to them simply containing the term "Cloverfield" somewhere on the video page. In an e-mail to aintitcool.com, a connection between Cloverfield and Ethan Haas was denied. However, there are still were a few outstanding similarities. Everyone who completed the puzzles on the Ethan Haas website and gave their email addresses received a message on January 18, 2008. The subject line read "The Revelations of Ethan Haas Has Begun 1-18-08", putting emphasis on the date, which was written in the same format that was used for the promotion of the film.
Lizzy Caplan, the actress playing Marlena in the film, was also on the sitcom The Class, in which she had a romantic interest in a character named Ethan Haas.

''Alpha Omega: The Beginning and The End''

On July 7, 2007, OMG WTF EHWR?! traced domain record information to an individual with connections to an RPG company called Mind Storm Labs. It was the first published evidence that Ethan Haas Was Right might be a promotion for that company's forthcoming role-playing game, Alpha Omega: The Beginning and The End.
Four days later, on July 11, 2007, Wraith, a former writer for the now-defunct Total Gamer News, unaware of any previous proof, presented further evidence that Ethan Haas indeed was a promo for the Mind Storm Labs game Alpha Omega: The Beginning and The End.
If all the puzzles at EthanHaasWasRight.com are finished, the reader can see that the city in the background is badly wrecked, and about an inch from the left of that, the reader can faintly see a similar image from the Alpha Omega site.
Although not conclusive evidence of a connection, the solution for puzzle #5 "The beginning is the end" appears to be a slight variation on the biblical Alpha and Omega "I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end."
Also, the alphabet key that appears when you hover your mouse cursor over one of the stars has a complete set of 26 in-game symbols, but only the real-world "A" and "Z" shown below them; the 24 letters in between are only implied, not shown. A and Z are the first and last letters of the English alphabet, as alpha and omega are the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet.
As of August 2, this was confirmed as the website has changed linking to a screen asking the following:
Clicking "No" takes you back to the original site with the puzzles. Clicking "Yes" takes you to the new official Alpha Omega website.

News coverage

EHWR has seen much coverage online as well as coverage in USA Today, Forbes Magazine and the LA Times. While most have been unable to provide definitively new information, they have largely served to spread notice of the viral marketing campaign to the Internet community at large, and were the ones to first point out the viral marketing campaign to prospective players. All of the online coverage has been related to a supposed link between EHWR and J. J. Abrams' "Cloverfield".