On the morning of August 7th, 2020 the Official LP twitter account posted that the Linkin Park website had “crashed”, tweeting “Anyone know anything about 20 year old computers?” to their 5.9 million followers.

It appeared the culprit was a mysterious executable error that forced visitors to load a “cached version” of the band’s official site. Once in, they were greeted with a circa 2000’s desktop, archaic operating system included.

The site’s clock was stuck on 10.24.2000 (the date Hybrid Theory was released) and fans were greeted with a virtual playground to explore. Twitter, Reddit and fan forums were set ablaze as fans went to work trying to figure out what this meant.

As the campaign unfolded, fans learned that the cached site was actually the old PC Mike Shinoda used to mix the Hybrid theory album, and that he had “brought it online” once more to recover files thought long lost. Fans immediately realized the band was planning something for Hybrid Theory’s anniversary, but what?

Each day we silently dropped a new chunk of content to complete the puzzle, and once the dust had cleared fans had amazed us with their tenacity, hunting down even the most gratuitously hidden Easter eggs. Through collaboration Linkin Park fans unlocked the campaign finale; the announcement of the immense Hybrid Theory 20th Anniversary Collection.