What is Theory 11? In case you have missed all the buzz on July 25th Lee Asher posted a cryptic message to several online message boards: The Magic Cafe, Dan and Dave, Decknique there are also threads over at Penguin and the Magic Woods amongst others.
Since then every Monday at Midnight EST there has been a new video from a different magician, so far we have seen Lee Asher, Dan & Dave Buck, Chris Kenner, Aaron Fisher, Dan White & Wayne Houchin.
In those videos and web-page source were hidden clues to hidden web-pages that contained additional footage, pictures and further clues. The trail has involved calling phone numbers, reversing audio, translating codes from Binary, Hex and Base64 etc. at one stage random people recieved mail from Chris Kenner with a copy of Magic Man Examiner and a pack of Jerry’s Nugget cards.
It was speculated that following the departure of Jonathan Bayme from Ellusionist, he would somehow be involved in Theory11, a mysterious video appeared on Digg which was rapidly deleted, but seemed to hint that T11 would be some kind of online shop. The verdict is still out on this.
That is a basic recap if you have missed all this, to save you having to trawl through the hidden clues, and hundreds of pages of message board threads, I have been keeping track of the hidden links etc. so as to not spoil it too much if you don’t wish to know, and want to investigate a bit yourself, I have put together a seperate page with a list of the hidden links and transcriptions of the public videos:
This will be updated if anything else appears. Bottom line is this launches at 11pm EST this Friday 31st August, so you have a little bit of time to catchup before launch day.
I am still in two minds about this, after all I have said on this blog about hype in marketing magic, this has to be the biggest, and they have certainly played to a certain target market, posting on the above boards, yet I can’t help be a little excited when you see the list of potential people that are involved in this, and the time and effort put in to the campaign.
Yet if this isn’t something really specical, if it turns out to be just another webstore/dvd/trick I think there will be a lot of dissapointed people, but if this is as incredible as they make out, we could be about to witness something special. I for one can’t wait to find out. Will post more if any updates happen between now and Friday!