“Half a million people visited the site within days of launch.
This wasn’t the only way to create messages in the checkboxes, however.
Each checkbox was effectively a bit - the most basic unit of information in computing.
A bit is either a 0 or a 1, much like a checkbox is unchecked or checked.
ASCII is basically the code that stores text in computers.
“I have no idea why I did this.
I just did it.”
Instead Nolen found messages - specifically website URLs.
“A URL with ‘catgirls’ in it was sitting there in my database and I PANICKED.
I thought I’d been hacked!
I started searching through my code, searching through my logs, trying to find the problem.”
The website hadn’t been hacked, however.
It pointed to a Discord called “Checking Boxes”, where a small number of players had gathered.
The players are understandably excited when suddenly the game’s creator showed up in their server.
When he did, it looked like this:
So there’s a lot going on here!
In addition to the drawings, we’ve got some secrets.
There’s the binary message I found, but above that is a base64 version of the same message.
“And it totally worked!!
!pic.twitter.com/rRjwn8lmlB
“It was sick.
It was so cool.
And I found this so moving,” writes Nolen.
“I spent my childhood doing dumb stuff on the computer.
“There’s no way I’d be doing what I do now without that encouragement.
“Many people were mad about bots on OMCB.
I totally get that.
Bots can be frustrating.
But the people in this discord were so creative, so talented, so cool!
The mischief makers of today will make the games of tomorrow,” he concluded.
“I can’t wait to see what this discord goes on to make”.
The tagline of his site is “The internet can still be fun!”
and players doing dumb, mischievous stuff is part of that same spirit.
Well done, everybody.
