A co-production between McDonald's, AKQA, and Jane McGonigal,[2] the game was notable for its global scope: taking place across six continents, in seven languages, and running for six months (29 February – 24 August 2008).
It began with six amnesiac athletes with strange tattoos, and culminated in the "revival" of a fictional Ancient Olympic sport – which the narrative described as having disappeared 2000 years ago before the events of the game.
[4] Over the first week of March, www.findthelostring.com was populated with blogs for "her" (Ariadne) and "the others" (Lucie, Markus, Noriko, Mei Hui, Larissa and Diego), each in a different language: English, French, German, Japanese, Mandarin, Portuguese and Spanish.
The week culminated in a simultaneously run Lost Sport competition, with teams racing in Beijing, Tokyo, Wellington, San Francisco, Salvador and London.
They found each other through blogs and Flickr, and worked with players to discover the reasons for their memory loss and the meaning of the mysterious tattoo each bore on their left forearms, reading "Trovu la ringon perditan" – "Find the Lost Ring" in Esperanto.