When it comes to including the community in crafting a game’s lore, no developer does more than Respawn with Apex Legends. They have already been making fan-drawn, Respawn written comics since October 2020, but those are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to collaborating with the content creators who love Apex.
Take, for example, the 2019 Crypto ARG. The Apex community created an alternate reality game about the hacker Legend, Crypto, but Respawn ended up attaching a canon lore reveal to the end of it. A work order that originated in the fan-created alternate reality game, which began during Apex Legends’ third season, was even later referenced in an in-game loading screen for season five.
Canon confirmed. https://t.co/QYOZAqct97
— Tom Casiello (@tommiecas) May 17, 2020
The ARG all started with a 13-second video on the official Apex Legends subreddit. The video showed a CRT-style screen with the Apex logo and Crypto’s insignia, along with various references to characters from the game, like Mirage. From there, fans like Matthew “Spear” Morales started enthusiastically solving the puzzles someone in the community was creating for them.
“It started off with this one puzzle and then it kept going on,” Spear told Upcomer. “People started out solving the puzzle in the subreddit, in the comments section, in the Discord people were talking about the ARG. And suddenly we noticed that it was kind of fun to be involved in this alternate reality game relating to Crypto, since his lore was somewhere around the same vibe of being very suspicious and low key and under the radar.”
As the ARG progressed, Spear ended up becoming one of the people looking to organize and manage what was happening in the Apex lore Discord. This led the ARG’s creator to reach out to him to start helping out with the game itself. Spear was having fun contributing to the game, but by phase three, the ARG had grown time consuming. Spear began to to wonder what all this effort was really going toward.
“I wanted to know if it was connected to the lore, officially, or if the creator had some sort of connection with Respawn,” Spear said. “And then they confirmed, ‘yeah, this will end up being something official. At the end of the Crypto ARG, we will get an official lore piece.’ So that gave me this huge boost of hype.”
That’s when the creator asked Spear to design the penultimate phase for the Crypto ARG. Spear made a fairly complex website that featured logins and input commands. This site directly preceded the reddit banner that would reveal the final piece of lore. Though the community team behind the ARG had to repeatedly clarify that they were the ones working on it, not Respawn, they did get a canon piece of lore written by Respawn Entertainment’s lead writer Manny Hagopian (though he wasn’t lead at the time).
