During that Pre-Show coverage, Geoff Keighley & Kat Hunter were saying that there "Haven't been a lot of leaks" and the first time they haven't had any major leaks. :)

Yeah, right. Guess that's the benefit of having a smaller blog.. a lot of things go unnoticed.

I'll have some thoughts put up later on those other new developments that were announced. The "WOW Annual Pass" thing seemed kind of new and rushed, maybe it was to make up for the missing Diablo 3 release announcement. Things are just way too busy right now, and I've barely had a chance to use the PC. Sunday should be better.

* UPDATE (10/22/11 5:21 AM):

Okay, something SERIOUSLY WTF just happened. I was looking at the imgur link again and the "Posting Date" suddenly changed to "Saturday, October 22 at 10:53 GMT". As of right now it's saying it was uploaded "1 HOUR AGO" which is incorrect. I used IMGUR for this exact reason, so that it could be timestamped. I'll investigate to figure out what happened.

* UPDATE (10/22/11 5:57 AM):

Here's a comparison page you can use. This was posted around the same time as the original (so no weird /r/Diablo restructuring.)

Direct Link: http://i.imgur.com/FAp8v.png
Info Page: http://imgur.com/FAp8v

The reason those pages exist were because they were part of a puzzle on the "Important Notices" page.

Here's the specific entry:

* Research research research! If you find new information, share it. It's very important to read everything on the site from beginning to end. It helps many future blogposts make more sense. This blog covers many different topics, and important secrets or hidden gems and puzzles can be found anywhere. Keep your eyes open, investigate, and read..

If you noticed, there was discoloration of certain characters, and if you did a mouse-over you would have discovered "hidden" hyperlinks on the characters.

Each of the hyperlinks went here:

http://i.imgur.com/FAp8v.png - How to piece together the puzzle together
http://pastebin.com/RFUi5Mzz -> The letters "TM" and "Case Sensitive"
http://pastehtml.com/view/b47z32u7o.txt -> a link to Youtube where the letters were "r."
http://tinypaste.com/865cd -> The letters "5Q"

(There are info pages on each of those too showing when they were first uploaded, or when the Youtube comment was first made. I wanted to make sure everything had undeniable evidence, but I didn't anticipate this imgur.com quirk.)

They all combined to make: http://i.imgur.com/ TM 5Q r. png

And I found comments about the puzzle (and specific Blizzcon reveals) here, here, here, and here (this is a page with that Blogspot missing comments problem, but hopefully should be fixed soon.)

I can't believe I have to go through this nonsense. It was just supposed to be cut and dry.

* FINAL UPDATE

Ahh here we go! It's a stupid Reddit feature and just temporary. If you view the "embed codes" on the post, you can see the original posting date: http://imgur.com/TM5Qr?tags

The original is still there. Reddit changed info for some reason whenever it gets linked back. So now you can't flame me anymore assholes.

Have you seen the trailer for the new movie CHRONICLE? It looks pretty awesome, check it out:



Plot Outline: Three high school students make an incredible discovery, leading to their developing uncanny powers beyond their understanding. As they learn to control their abilities and use them to their advantage, their lives start to spin out of control, and their darker sides begin to take over.

From the trailer, it looks like some real thought went into it.. ie, how people would really behave if the same thing happened to them.

Can't wait to see it when it comes out. Release date is Feb 3, 2012. I hope it's a sleeper hit.

This is much more difficult now than it used be. Corporations are wising up, they know all the tricks, and their employees are much more prepared and careful. A lot of it is just learning by example too.. when someones blog or resume is exposed, everyone else in the industry reads all about it so they try not to make the same mistakes.

Most gaming developer veterans are careful what they write about, but the best information comes from new hires, interns, and egotistical braggarts.

You can call these "leaks" if you want to.. but they're more like discoveries. Leaks would be something that you confirm from an inside source and usually it's very specific information that's supposed to be confidential.

With all of the recent gaming and information leaks, I figured I would share how some kinds of video game related leaks are discovered. The internet sleuthing site "Supererogatory", for example, made EXTENSIVE use of these techniques for pretty much all of his posts.

1. At the top of your arsenal will be Google Alerts.

Starting out, let's say you want to find some older information on Google. You would use very specific searches like the following:

inurl:resume "Blizzard Entertainment" - the URL has the word "resume" in, and Blizzard Entertainment is a keyword on the page.

Useful for finding those unknown www.brandonsmith.com/resume.html specific sites.

site:cghub.com "David Grexton" - for searching specific sites, especially forums, for any posts that contain this users name.

filetype:pdf resume "Bethesda Softworks" 2011 - for finding PDF or DOC files (typically resumes) with specific information for recent dates.

There are also specific keyword searches, like "Blizzard Entertainment" "Unannounced MMO" or "Blizzard Entertainment" "Next Gen MMO" but these can give you a lot of information that are too many to filter.

Now, most of the historical Google information has already been found or discovered by others. But, what's so great about Google Alerts is that it will automatically email you as soon as a NEW Google entry is made. So, if someone adds a new resume with specific keywords, as soon as Google crawlers capture it, you're notified. Google Alerts is an awesome tool for finding new information, especially when you're filtering by document types or specific keywords.

If you have a Google Alert for just "unannounced game" for example, you'll get too many Google Alerts daily.. so you want to make your alerts as specific as possible.

2. Another great tool is www.LinkedIn.com.

If you want to do any useful searches, you need to sign up with an account.

Google used to be a great search engine for LinkedIn, but they've changed their system and have severely restricted Google crawlers now. For example, you could create Google Alerts like site:linkedin.com "Blizzard Entertainment" and you would be notified immediately when a new account was created with Blizzard in their credentials. You can't do that anymore now. :(

Now, you have to manually search LinkedIn and just keep track of employee names yourself. If you search for "unannounced mmo" blizzard or "next gen" for example, you can find all of the Blizzard employees who are working on the game or have worked on previous unannounced titles. You also need to be creative with your keywords: unannounced, untitled, unnamed, *titled, *announced, next gen, nextgen mmo, secret, project, etc.

If you want to get invited to see more information about a user, all you need is a 3rd degree of separation. There are TONS of employees, industry contacts, and especially recruiters who have a "Will Accept All Invites" policy. Create yourself a name and account, and then do a search for recruiters or keywords like "accepts invites", "all invites", etc. In a couple days, you could quickly generate 100 contacts on your LinkedIn account, with 3rd party connections to all major game developers. This gives you open access to their LinkedIn accounts, and you can typically see more information than what would be available in their public profiles.

3. http://whois.domaintools.com

What's great about this site is that it creates an individual Google-searchable page every time a new domain is registered.

If you type, site:whois.domaintools.com blizzard you can see most domain names with Blizzard within it's title or description.

It's not the most reliable website for historical webpages, but it's great when you create a new Google Alert using the site:whois.domaintools.com command. You can be alerted any time a new domain registration is created within whatever parameters you set.

Sometimes you need to get a little creative.. don't use "Blizzard Entertainment" for example, but rather search using their Administrator or Technical Contact names. Or, have active searches for "DomainsByProxy" or other Proxy companies that hold domains for private entities like many of your favorite game publishers.

More to come..