Forums / Discussion / Meme Research

If anyone remembers Eon8, your help in researching its beginnings would be greatly appreciated The exact content from the site prior to July 2006 is no longer up on the site, and I can only find bits and pieces of it on a few YTMND sites.

Any information is appreciated.

There is a ton of information on it all over. A good place to start is by googling it. It was discussed on countless message boards, websites, blogs, chat rooms, you name it. I don't know if it can be classified as a pure meme but it was a major event in the history of the internet.

Here are some of the more important sites with articles.

http://wiki.ytmnd.com/EON8

http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Purpose_of_mysterious_website_Eon8_revealed

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=eon8

http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/weblog/permalink/eon8/

http://www.argn.com/2006/06/eon8_activate/

There was a YouTube movie made about it among a number of other related videos.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_0Gg7jDMYw

https://www.youtube.com/user/eon8

YTMND's investigation

http://eon8theinvestigation.ytmnd.com/

Uncyclopedia entry

http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Eon8

This is all just a sample. You can find a lot more if you do a little bit of research. :-)

Don't forget Google insights.

Archive.org is great for finding out what a page used to look like.
http://web.archive.org/web/20060209040351/http://www.eon8.com/

It looks like it was just a countdown clock with a few links below.

Home | Project X21-B | Project Z-Theta9 | Login
Update: Group Blue-15 has now been reassigned to Project X21-B

I would also search for "Project X21-B", "Project Z-Theta9", and "Group Blue-15"

This resembles the trailhead of an augmented reality game.

so it was created to gauge the reaction of the internet population huh?

thats actually pretty awesome

by the way im back

also, i'd say its a meme since it was copied and edited to various ytmnd's and discussed heavily on various boards

I forgot to mention that somebody even started an Eon8 fan site but never finished: http://www.eon8.co.nr/

Also here are three more sites which contain articles:

http://slashdot.org/story/06/07/01/1539215/Mysterious-Website-Actually-Social-Experiment

http://kotaku.com/184679/update--bite-the-waxing-quintile-what-the-christ-is-eon8

http://www.joystiq.com/2006/07/01/eon8-pwns-internets-halo-3-fans-cry

Most importantly here is a mirror of the page that was displayed once the countdown reached zero: http://0re0.org/eon8/deployed21b.php.htm

The first YTMND created on July 1st (the day the countdown clock ran out) pretty much sums it up.
http://vivaeon8.ytmnd.com/

Guy designs website that builds up hype. ARG fans get excited about finding what seems like an ARG. Others who don't know about ARGs scratch their heads in bewilderment. Gullible/easily-exictable people get scared. YTMNDers go nuts making YTMNDs.

Countdown ends, guy admits that he never wrote a 2nd act, and makes and NEDM reference.

It sounds like a big let-down to me. It's like someone bursting into a town hall, shouting "everyone! Look at me! I have something important to tell you!" And as soon as he realizes that everyone has turned to look, he makes a fart sound with his mouth and runs away.

At least when the countdown clock on ThisIsMyMilwaukee reached 0, a new link appeared on on the site that led to a puzzle about a meetup, where actors played parts from the mythology built up in the clues, and people went home with a cash prize.

The guy's explanation: "The purpose of this project was to determine the reactions of the internet public to lack of information" is just disappointing. It's not like he did anything that hadn't done before.

ilovebees.com used the same idea of a mysterious countdown clock in their ARG that was designed to promote the release of Halo 2. This was 2 years prior.

Any information gleaned from the Eon8 experiment was just this guy's own firsthand experience of already well-established attention-getting methods…but with no delivery of anything that would make playing along worthwhile.

Thanks guys, I found a lot of those links, but I'll use everything to start rewriting the article.

Okay cool. I deadpooled it yesterday based on your recommendation, but I'll rescue it back to Submissions now.