I had decided on a nice evening to myself. I bought a semi-expensive steak from one of the supermarket shelves that’s harder to reach. I spent more than £5 on wine. Between turning the potatoes and warming a skillet, I would casually check the results of the fermenting internet conspiracy I had been monitoring all day. I went home. At 1am, I watched a Discord chat community of thousands tear itself apart in search of prime numbers, base64 sequences and datamoshed imagery. It was fantastic.
Sombra is Overwatch's supposed 23rd character, and has been the subject of an Alternate Reality Game (or ARG) since the game's release. By this point, she's something like the Godot of Overwatch - a figure one talks about, speculates on, even loves in absentia, but never sees. Months of cryptic, miniature hints about the character – who, depending on which crackpot screed you’re reading, is an invisible stealth melee user, a teenage hacker, a rogue AI, or all of the above – have slowly splintered the dam holding back an absolute torrent of internet froth. Yesterday, it broke, and I was happily washed away amidst it.
The story of The Skycoder Post is a brilliant one in and of itself, but this isn’t it (this is). Suffice it to say, a countdown timer sitting next to an encoded number “23” became a very big deal indeed, promising to offer something, or everything, about Sombra. And then it reached 0 seconds.
At 8.30pm GMT, the post a global community had hinged its hopes on simply disappeared from the forums. First came the responses – we skipped past denial and went straight to anger. Almost instantly, tens of posts appeared in turn at the top of the page – imperfectly filling that Skycoder-shaped hole – claiming trolling, misdirection, or just written like howls of despair. That passed quickly enough – then the search began.
At about 8.45, a ripple went around that amomentincrime.com – a key part of the Skycoder mystery – had been altered. Now we had a loading percentage to watch and a new Spanish message hidden in the site’s source code, something to the effect of having discovered Sombra’s password, and having to wait for what comes next.
That counter went up 1% in around half an hour. The next percent took at least twice as long. It wasn’t enough. The community went into overdrive.
The Game Detectives Discord chatroom (which had performed much of the cypher-cracking legwork with Skycoder earlier in the day) recovered from a server outage presumably caused by 5,000 people losing their collective shit simultaneously, and the speculation started flying.
Amomentincrime.com - four lines of purple plain text on a black background - became almost absurdly fertile soil for conspiracy and intrigue. Its new mention of Omnics – the game’s race of sentient robots – sent people looking for clues in the official Overwatch skill videos about the game’s two metallic combatants. A call went round that distorted images had been seen flashing up as the videos cycled (false alarm: this had always happened). Some called out the version of the Sombra protocol in use – we had seen v1.3, v1.7 and v1.9 during the course of the day. Move the decimal and you have 13, 17 and 19, three consecutive prime numbers. The next one? The mystical number 23. That one’s still hanging around.
We saw people searching for clues in the hex code for the colour of text used, running cryptographic exercises over the string of text created when you tried to go to a non-existent subdomain of the website, emailing supposed keywords to the website’s associated email address. Even the translation of the Spanish language text became a battleground, as arguments raged over whether we had a “key” or a “password”, or whether Sombra was using slang as a clue.
Then the hoaxes began. Well, probably hoaxes. Honestly, who knows. A website, playoverwatch.us appeared, displaying its own Spanish message, singling out the game’s Gibraltar level as a source of clues. Personalities in the Overwatch video scene suddenly began changing their Twitter names to Skycoder and began posting that same Gibraltar message, strings of code from earlier clues, or mentioning a “God Program” (a story element so far only mentioned in the Overwatch comics), while responding to quizzical fans only with .”¿Quién es 'Sombra'?”
Multiple Game Detectives quickly debunked the new website, calling into question its creation that day, and the personal mailing address associated with it. One overzealous sleuth even called the phone number associated with the site (no answer) and was firmly rebuked by others. The fact that the Twitter accounts had posted the playoverwatch.us message cast them in doubt, too. And yet debate raged - a splinter group of Discord users appeared, accepting only “believers” in the Twitter messages.
From here, even more speculation poured forth. Blizzard suddenly reported a DDOS attack on its EU servers. Coupled with the sudden inability of players to be able to access the Gibraltar level on the game’s beta testing server (very probably caused by the sheer amount of people trying to do the self-same thing), people put 2 and 3 together – this attack had to be part of the Sombra mystery itself.
I am not one to make fun here. I had begun writing notes to myself at this point, desperately trying to keep some sense of order to the storm of mysteries raining in faster than they were debunked. I began to question myself. “Am I a Twitter believer? Which Discord should I stay in, is this the place for me?” What if a mystery was solved in another room and I missed it? Chrome crashed once, because I had about forty tabs open, each one another potential clue.
There was so much more – fake sightings of heat-hazey invisible characters in-game, wild Photoshops of faked-up new level details (leant credence by a genuine patch to the PC version of the game at around the right time), and the endless churn of messages from people who were getting to the party late, and re-reporting old red herrings to the consternation of those on the bleeding edge.
It’s easy to sneer at this stuff – both the over-reaching wish to find something, and that desire for fakery – but it’s now part of the the lifeblood of the Sombra ARG scene. Even that name, Skycoder, is itself an in-joke on Blizzard’s part, calling out to an intrepid group of Sombra codebreakers who mistook basic image artifacting in one level’s skybox to be a hidden code, and turned it into a song (a song which, by the way, is now actually part of the game, played in part during a Zenyatta emote).
Blizzard’s willingness to engage with the fuzziest peripheries of Overwatch fandom and then incorporate them into the game means even a straight-up mistake can retroactively become part of the puzzle.
I woke up this morning with tannins on my teeth and a gentle headache. The first thing I did was check amomentincrime – the counter has hit a measly 5%, and hasn’t moved all day. The Discord – now split between four dedicated channels – is still chugging along, but last night’s fervour is diminished. Many have accepted that Sombra’s message to “wait for what comes next” is more literal than cryptic.
The percentage uptick seems erratic, with some claiming it will hit 100% in a week, while others posit that it’ll take until BlizzCon in November. Given that the percentage seems to be updated manually, some even think it’s just a case of the relevant employee not having woken up yet. Of course, some think it will end at 23%. Incidentally, I only realised today that The Number 23 is that Jim Carrey conspiracy thriller.
After almost 24 (23!??) hours of thinking about Sombra, I still basically have no idea what she’ll be, when she’ll turn up, or even what’s going on in a wider sense. In that time, I’ve learned some of the basics of code-breaking, learned far more about the lore of a game I’m already in love with, frightened my friends and drunk a whole a bottle of half-decent Cabernet Sauvignon. It barely matters that the ARG has gone almost nowhere, that we know so little more than we did - it's led me down down paths I never expected to go down. Surely that's the point?
Joe Skrebels is IGN's UK News Editor, and he's going to sleep now. Berate him on Twitter.
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