While everyone else was worrying about Steam’s Christmas outage and the privacy issues that sprang from it, Gabe and company have been hiding away an ARG (Alternate reality game) within the store pages of their currently running winter sale.

It all started when someone found out that typing “search” in any steam store page’s search bar would bring up a password prompt. Further investigation revealed that a barcode, nearly matching the one tattooed on agent 47’s neck in the Hitman series, was placed in the Northpole Noir comic. After entering that code into the Hitman store page they received yet *another* piece of code that, when added to the winter comic URL, led to a voice recording.

“I was on the right track. I could feel it. Tomorrow, I was going to search again.”

Other clues have been found in the Northpole Noir card itself, yet no one has, as of yet, been able to figure out the correct password for the aforementioned prompt. Rumors abound as to what the ARG is truly hiding, though odds are good that is has nothing to do with Half-Life 3.