Who amogus remembers John Hargrave's Zug.com?

https://web.archive.org/web/20120302033825/http://www.zug.com/

You can click on the articles from the wayback links, but any videos are broken "no flash support" boxes

They shut down in 2013

some older web design:

2008

2007

We're always told to be afraid of terrorists broadcasting secret messages on national TV. I've always wondered: don't the terrorists have Yahoo Groups? Aren't the other members of the cell on speed dial? Can't they send out an Evite when it's time to stage an attack?

To promote the new ZUG book, PRANK THE MONKEY, we wanted to show how easy it would be to broadcast a secret message not just on national TV, but on TV's biggest event.

We hacked the Super Bowl.

During the second quarter of Super Bowl XLI, a team of elite, highly-trained pranksters quietly distributed 2,350 packets to the lower east section of Dolphin Stadium. These "Party Packs" were labeled by individual seat and row number, and contained a six-inch light-up necklace. An official-looking brochure explained that by turning on the necklace lights during the halftime show, audience members would spell the word "PRINCE."

But they didn't. They spelled a secret message that we broadcast to 93.1 million people.

You're about to read a real-life heist story. Super Bowl XLI was a Level One national security event, usually reserved for Presidential inaugurations. We had to get two full vanloads of materials through federal marshals, police, police dogs, bomb squads, ATF, robots, and a five-ton state-of-the-art X-ray crane. We spent four months on this prank, which required five people on the inside, one on the outside, and dozens of support staff.

This was the Super Stunt.

A contemporary site, https://www.cockeyed.com/ by Rob Cockerham is still up and running

https://cockeyed.com/pranks/hargrave/superbowl01.shtml

On Wednesday, January 10th, I got a call from Sir John Hargrave of Zug.com. He was putting together a secret team of men to help him carry out an ambitious plan.

After swearing me to secrecy, he laid out the details.

"Are you familiar with the Caltech halftime show card prank?

I was. Hundreds of large colored cards were used by cheerleaders at the Rose Bowl to form giant words and pictures across the audience. Pranksters from Caltech (not one of the schools at the football game) had switched up the audience directions, changing one of the designs to say CALTECH. This was in front of a national television audience, and is considered by some to be the best college prank of all time.

Something similar was done in 2004, at the annual Harvard/Yale football game:

(broken image link)

"We Suck" Yale vs. Harvard Prank, November 20, 2004

John continued. "I'm going to try something similar... at the Super Bowl."

"Oh ****".

The plan was to carefully distribute thousands of blue and white necklace lights to seven sections of Dolphin Stadium in Miami, which, when turned on, would spell out a secret message, visible to the rest of the stadium, the blimp, the phalanx of world media, and to the 95 million viewers watching the Superbowl from home.

It would be totally impossible.

"I'm in".

John laid out a handful of critical details, letting me know how this might work. He had a plan.

For the rest of the day, I sat at my desk in disbelief. I was going to Super Bowl XLI in Miami, to help in the biggest prank ever, and I couldn't tell anyone.