The Art of The Heist - Quick Start Guide

Hello and welcome to the Quick Start Guide for "The Art of the Heist", or Heist for short.

You are probably here due to one or more of the following:

1. Virgil King of Code
2. Last Resort Retrieval
3. Stolen Audi A3

These three elements are all related and are the essence of Heist. This guide tries to explain each, and how they relate to each other and to the game in whole.

Heist is what we like to call an Alternate Reality Game (ARG). Simply put, it's an interactive story told using real life events, character interactions, and Internet websites. We know that Heist is sponsored by Audi, but don't think of it as a marketing campaign. Take it for what it is - a very fun and enjoyable game which you can participate in for free.

Heist is also unique in that elements from real life and the game are seamlessly blending together. Some of the characters are real people with real names, others might be actors. Events could unfold in front of our eyes in real life, and different entities who exist in real life are presented as part of the Heist universe. That is why this guide will make no distinction between which elements are real or fake.

1- Virgil King of Code
 

It started on March 29 when the ARG community got news of a new game. This took us to the website of Virgil Tatum, a video game designer with a lot of history and personality.

On Virgil's site we found several section, which can be accessed by using the navigational links at the bottom:

• Bio - A self-portrait written by Virgil about Virgil, and gives a good idea about his background
• Gameography - A look at all the different games Virgil created in his career as a game designer
• Rants - A personal blog written by Virgil
• Electronic Ouroboros - Another section where Virgil goes on about his brilliance
• Nisha the Game - Virgil latest game, "The Nisha Chronicles Vol. 1" based on a real life character

It is from the last section that we discover the identity of Nisha Roberts, an art theft recovery, which points us to her company and the Last Resort Retrieval website.

2- Last Resort Retrieval
 

As the website states:

Last Resort Retrieval is one of the only full time investigative companies focused solely on high-end art recovery. We cut through the red tape of police, international boundaries, security services, and insurance companies to provide you with what you want the most: the return of your priceless possession.

The site looks very plain, with only contact details for the company, and e-mails to Nisha and someone called Ian.

The interesting part is, if you click inside the login box, a network error automatically fills in the username and password for you, allowing you to access their personal mailboxes.

If you choose "Client" as the username, you will be redirected to a mailbox with information about some of the cases they have previously worked on. Now is a good time to look at one of the five cases to get an idea of what LRR do for a living.

Next, you can go back to the LRR homepage and pick Ian or Nisha as the username. This will take you into their mailboxes where there's a huge amount of information. You will see a list of current messages in the inbox, as well as many other folders on the left side containing movies, sounds, files, messages, chat logs, and a lot of additional information.

Do not be intimidated by how much there is to see. You can go through it anytime you want at your own pace, but now we'll cover the basics which lead us to the next discovery.

By going through the old information we discover that Nisha and Ian are working together to recover lost art for their clients. Nisha being a former secret-agent does all the field work, traveling around the world and facing the bad guys if it comes to that. Ian is the guy who stays at home, does the research, and deals with the clients.

On April 1st, Ian received an e-mail from his DJ friend Will Star, who tells Ian that he's ready for their party at the car dealership on Park Ave after 7 PM.

So some members of the ARG community follow up on this and find that the car dealership in question could be "Audi Park Avenue" in New York. On of our guys volunteers to go there and reports back with the following:

"at the audi car place, there's something weird going on there. Took some pics, lemme see if i can get them loaded up here"

Looking inside the dealership, there seems to be yellow tape surrounding an area which is supposed to be occupied by a car. Behind the window, the following sign:

Which reads:

A stolen car? The plot thickens...

3- Stolen Audi A3
 

So, going back outside the dealership, we find two security personnel guarding the place, and a lady with a clipboard.

The lady with the clipboard is handing out flyers, so we get one and this is what it says:

So it seems they already have a suspect known as "John McGill". Wait.. the picture looks familiar. In fact, it's our friend Ian from Last Resort Retrieval! Digging into Ian's folders we find a Press Pass under the name John McGill which we believe he used to gain access to the event. We also found  a shipping document for the same stolen Audi confirming that Ian was tracking the car a while ago.

So Ian gets away, but apparently he did not steal the car. Well, he did steal it, but not from the dealership. The car was stolen before Ian got to it, so he stole it from the people who stole it as we learn from a chat log he has with a friend.

Now, leaving Ian aside for a moment, we wonder what happened to the car. We knew it was scheduled to be shown at the  New York International Auto Show at the Javits, so went sent someone there and found that the car was indeed missing, but nobody knew anything about it being stolen from the dealership.

There was just an empty elevated revolving stage:

However, we find other people went there earlier before the sign was removed:

And there's a picture of our missing red A3!

At this stage there are other people following the game too. We find a new website dedicated to tracking the Stolen A3, conveniently called www.stolena3.com.

The site is run by someone called Todd, who also has a discussion board for talking about what's going on. He does an excellent job of detailing the events that took place at the car dealership with pictures and videos.

We keep digging, and find this on the official Audi A3 website:

The label in the lower right corner is referring to our car again, and if we click on it it takes us to a special page about the missing 2006 Audi A3 with more pictures and information.

And right there in the middle it says: For all information and inquiries please visit www.lastresortretrieval.com

Which takes us back to Nisha's site! Going through Nisha's e-mails and Audio logs we find that she has been hired by Audi to find the missing A3, after convincing them not to go to the police, because she doesn't want anything to happen to Ian.

And that covers most of the events that took place during the first week of The Art of The Heist.

More To See (New)

Up to this point you should have clicked all of the above links and tried to read as much as possible. That would give you a complete picture of how the game started.

Once you're done with that, there are two more things to do:
 

• Check out the Unfinished Game on Virgil's website. This has been solved and leads to 3 new private sections. The passwords can be found at Unfiction, and provide more insight into Virgil's character.
   

• The events of the first week of the game, and what exactly happened have been summarized at stolena3.com. This is excellent if you don't want to read all the information, just follow the summary but make sure you click on each and every link as you go through it.
   

Now What?

Relax, sit back, and get ready for the ride.

Make sure you went through all the information above. Re-visit the websites we found, see what Virgil has to say, read as much history as you can from the LRR mailboxes, and then come join the rest of the people playing this game.

Unfiction is the largest online ARG community. A group of us already started playing this from the beginning, and we welcome anyone and everyone to join us here.

In the Heist forums, you will find a lot of information about our current progress, categorized threads and daily updates. If you're just joining, go through the older messages and see what we have done from the beginning.

If you have IRC, you are welcome to join us in chat. Point your client to irc.chat-solutions.org:6667 and join #heist. If you don't have an IRC client you can use your web browser instead through the IRC Java Applet.

Alternatively, you can also use the discussion forum at stolena3.com, which is less crowded and less intimidating if you have no idea about ARGs.

And most importantly, to keep track of all the different information you need to visit the Trail of the Heist, which is a documentation of all events and occurrences within the game.

Don't worry if all this seems like too much. You can contribute simply by watching. Lurk in the forums as much as you want, or join the discussion straight away with any ideas you might have. The whole point is to enjoy the experience and share it with the community.

Good Luck, and Have fun!

Created by Ehsan - For further enquiries or suggestion e-mail heist[at]soogees[dot]com