The Marble Hornets Shrine

Marble Hornets is a web series created by Troy Wagner in 2009 and has become possibly one of the most famous ARGs, spawning a genre of ARG called the Slenderverse and influencing many other horror based stories.

Note: This shrine will only cover the YouTube channels of Marble Hornets, totheark, and the comics. Sadly I lack the patience to trudge through the Twitter account. :( HOWEVER- If you have/are willing to send/link/or otherwise provide media to things such as interviews, Twitter threads/posts, and other interesting/useful things worth documenting, please email me at hiddenfilmnerd@gmail.com and include a name you'd prefer me to refer to you by as thanks for helping with the project.

What IS Marble Hornets?

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Besides the obvious, Marble Hornets was a fan project created by Troy Wagner that was based on the character Slenderman, a character created by SomethingAwful user Victor Surge (real name Eric Knudsen). Slenderman was first released for a Photoshop contest with the prompt to "create a paranormal image" with the original image set being released onto the internet on June 10th, 2009. 9 days later, on June 19th, 2009, the YouTube channel "Marble Hornets" would be created and a day later the first video, "Introduction", would be released, detailing the events that are said to have occurred before the creation of the channel.

The same day, "Entry #1" would be released, giving us our first look at the Slenderman inspired monster that would become the well known antagnoist of Marble Hornets.

Dubbed "The Operator", it would later be decided by the community at large that this creature is different from Slenderman in one way that, while mildly irrelevant, means a lot for the anatomical properties of both entities. It lacks the tendrils first seen in the original Slenderman images. I, however, think the only real reason it was made a different creature was because of the nature of both IPs. If Eric or Troy wanted to create more media using either entity it couldn't be properly protected if said edge cases existed without formal paperwork, especially from larger companies. All the more power to them, though.

After the first two videos, Entry #2 would be released June 21st, 2009. This would be the entry in which we hear the voice of Joseph DeLage, who plays the character Alex Kralie. The following day, another YouTube channel would be created, totheark. The same day they would release a video titled "Regards".

This would be a video response (a now defunct feature of YouTube for anyone reading this born after 2005) to the channel Marble Hornets. The next day Entry #3 would be released, finally revealing the appearance of Alex Kralie.