Lost Experience
The advertisement listed a telephone number which brought up fictional voice mail lines for employees at the Hanso Foundation.
Commercials for the Hanso Foundation in subsequent weeks directed players to other in-game websites, some of which are tied to specific sponsors, as detailed below.
Most clues on the Hanso Foundation website are revealed by clicking on faintly marked anomalies in the web page design or by entering specific codes into webpages.
Also in May, Hyperion published the novel Bad Twin, a book written by Laurence Shames[8] and credited to fictional author Gary Troup, who was on the plane that crashed on Lost.
On 19 June, Rachel Blake's blog is revealed in the source code of the Hanso foundation site, which comes to play a major part of the second phase of the game.
Rogue investigator Blake posts videos of her traveling around the world (mostly Europe) to uncover the secret agenda of the Hanso Foundation.
The website (which was identified earlier as sharing IP address with thehansofoundation.org) features open-registration accounts to a video sequence editor.
Fans of Lost had been looking over the clues and discussing them on internet forums, and several websites were set up giving detailed information on all parts of the game.
In fact, within the alternate reality of the game itself, "Lost" is considered to be a fictional TV show based on real events and organizations.
[10] The Hanso Foundation commercial shown during the Lost episode on 10 May 2006 contained the on-screen text "Paid for by Sprite" and directed viewers to http://sublymonal.com/.
The minutes of the day at which these changes occurred correspond to the Lost numbers (4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42), though not every occurrence of these times results in the link.
Later a Sprite commercial appeared on the air that promoted the sublymonal website, which had changed to a completely Sprite-based subliminal ad site.
One commercial showed a person blind folded with a lemon and lime slice, getting small drops of Sprite in his mouth and eye.
Exploration of this site led players to a Jeep commercial hosted on YouTube, which contained game clues at the end.
On 26 May access to the directories of /usr/hmcintyr/ and /usr/pthompso/ was granted, created to appear as personal mail folders for Hugh McIntyre and Peter Thompson.
When moving the cursor to one of the "hotspots", one of the map compass points showed an odd text code in the same font as the glyphs in part 3 of the Lost experience.
Ostensibly a site about the psychic abilities of the yellow labrador retriever, solving a puzzle takes you to a bulletin board populated by fictional Verizon employees (the users all have Verizon-related puns in their names — iobiSeeingyou, DSLerator, etc.
[11] ABC has also released several videos in a nine part interview of Gary Troup, played by Laird Granger, on a fictional show called "Book Talk".
The videos were released on the Amazon, Borders, and Barnes & Noble web sites on their respective Bad Twin pages.
Michael Benson, the senior vice president of marketing at ABC, says that Troup was one of the initial crash victims, played by Frank Torres, of Oceanic Flight 815, being sucked into the plane's turbine in the pilot episode.
The apparent manuscript of Bad Twin was discovered by the characters of Lost in Season 2 and is read by Sawyer in the episode "Two for the Road".
On 9 May 2006, the fictitious corporation The Hanso Foundation ran a quarter-page ad in several major newspapers, including The Washington Post (on the 10th), The Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Chicago Tribune.
While the novel Bad Twin never makes explicit reference to the events of the show, there are a number of references in the novel to things mentioned in Lost, such as Widmore Industries, the Hanso Foundation, Mr. Cluck's Chicken Shack, Paik Heavy Industry, Cindy Chandler, and the numbers.
