You can call me Sherlock Deceth if you like, because I may be cracking down on this Looble.com mystery!

Remember back in one of my earlier posts I mentioned that I thought the person who first introduced us to Looble.com was probably on IRC discussing it with us? Well, I started investigating the people in #Looble by simply writing down which other channels they were in and then joined these channels to see if I could find one where everybody was laughing about how they were fooling us into believing in some weird mystery =p

Well, I didn’t find that room, but I did find one that was very interesting…!
I started asking people if they knew anything about Looble.com and John Vechey’s abduction. Many had no idea what I was talking about while others laughed and said they were in #Looble awaiting an update. Then finally I caught a break in #ARC! When I asked about John Vechey in this room, one person replied that, “the aliens at Popcap abducted him”. When I asked this person to elaborate, he just laughed and said, “JV hasn’t played ARC in ages buddy”.

You’re not going to believe this! It turns out ARC, stands for Attack-Retrieve-Capture. It is a multiplayer game that John Vechey worked on as a project in college which features players controlling UFO’s equipped with weapons who must capture the enemy teams flag.

Ok I lied, I’m not cracking down on this mystery, I’m even more confused than before. Was the Looble.com mystery an effort to promote an existing game named ARC? From what I gather, John Vechey no longer has any affiliation with this game, nor does Justin King. Again, whats the purpose of Looble.com? The only link I can see between ARC and Looble.com is that the initial discussions about Looble.com set us on this wild goose hunt which led us to ARC.

So in resume, we discussed what Looble… Looble might mean, then found an IRC channel named #Looble created by Justin King who has a music album named Le Bleu, and eventually Justin King changes his screen name to John Vechey for a few hours before vanishing. Upon vanishing, he talks about UFO’s stealing flags, which is the basis of this game that he (John Vechey) was a part of creating.

That pretty much leaves us at a dead end right now unless anybody has any ideas…

Well, John Vechey showed up and vanished pretty quickly. After replacing Justin King in #Looble for just a few hours, he picked up his bags and left completely last night.

Before he went, he said the following: “That UFO stole my flag, omg!”

Perhaps his vanishing act was an attempt at simulating an abduction? Who knows! What does this latest clue mean? Sounds like this new Looble game will have something to do with UFO’s, probably engaged in some nation wide struggle for power. Perhaps the flag reference implies that aliens have already conquered a nation, and the game will be based on getting back control of the country.

Keep an eye on Popcap games for a new release of a UFO game named Looble! Don’t be surprised if Looble.com is soon re-directed to Popcap.com in order to grab all the traffic they have generated to that domain with this whole mystery!

Alright ladies and gentlemen, it’s time to get excited. Could this still be a marketing ploy? Of course! But, it just got a lot more interesting because it’s not over yet! This is a real online mystery!

Justin King is gone! Kind of… Last night, he changed his name to John Vechey! Not a word was said, just the name changed…

Does this help solve the mystery? Actually, it makes it a lot more confusing. What the heck does John Vechey have to do with Justin King? Who is John Vechey? Well, of course we all searched the name right away this time, and apparently he is one of the founders of Popcap games. There is no mention of Justin King anywhere on the site…

So, is this whole thing really about promoting a game website? What does Looble… Looble have to do with any of this? How is Justin King involved?

Right now, the best guess seems to be that Justin King may be involved with developing music for a new game to be released at Popcap. How does Looble fit it? Perhaps it will be the game? Actually, thats not a bad theory at all if I do say so myself!