Every medium, as its ancestors
Every pro, has his anti’s, now you think about that

This seems to be related to how the page itself is written – as though half of the page is missing.  The background of the flashing cube also has words on it, if you look very closely.  With some photoshop manipulation it seems they’re words to a Tenacious D song.   The flash object, “pro.swf” is stored in a segment called “proPaine”, and further down there is another section called “antiPaine”, but this section is empty.   Maybe this half will be filled in later?  Trying to load anti.swf results in a 404, but trying other common file types leads to this image, which appears to be the mathematical definition of volume of a cube, and the rotation of a hypercube in 4 space.  The m(n)=1/2 n(n^3+1) appears to be some sort of definition for the 2n sides and the .75(sqrt2)=1.06066 is Prince Rupert’s Cube.  Somehow these three parts are all related.  The text behind the cube is taken from an academic paper on solar panels, which can be found here.  The only difference is that the two percents are changed but this text appears to be unimportant as it is only background.

There’s also a discrepancy in the naming of the film — on YouTube it is simply, “What’s in the in Box?” whereas on the website it says, “What is in the Box?”  The copywrite date on the site also says 2007.  So perhaps this is reused material?  Small errors, but every clue might be important at this point.

Others contend that this may simply be a test of visual effects that has pulled assets from Half Life 2.  But if that were the case, wouldn’t the author simply state that? Instead of alluding to a “Mystery of Mysteries?”   Whatever this video is, it is certainly interesting.    Slashfilm is reporting that this was filmed in Nijmegen, Netherlands, which means there’s probably no relation to Valve.  A little bit of YouTube examinations shows that there’s 4 videos on the account’s channel, one of which is the Mythbusters PhoneBook fan video, and some more searching shows that two students from Radboud University in the Netherlands won a contest to get to meet the Mythbusters.  Their names? Tim Smit and Steven Roeters, the two names attributed on the whatsinthebox.nl website.     In the other 3 videos on the account a tilted square with a ? mark in it can be seen in various places.  All hope of a Half Life 3 teaser seems dead now… but wait!

Gamespy is reporting…

Alas, the “What Is In The Box” video is just another project created by members of the rabid Half-Life community. We spoke with Vice President of Marketing Doug Lombardi today, and he went on record about the fact that neither of the videos were made or comissioned by Valve. “The Box video was a cool piece from the community. Two in just a few weeks,” said Lombardi “I hope there’s more on the way.”

Of course, that doesn’t really answer the question that we’re all dying to know: just what is in that box?!?

Damnit! Valve doesn’t even know!   So this is just an awesome fan-made video.  But what is in the goddamn cube?  A user on the uF forums appears to have figured out the relation of the equations.

By seeding a value of 1<n<1.0389, these 3 equations can be used as a finite or infinite loop. At each iteration, the value n (half the side length of the cube) is fed into the growth equation M(n) to produce a larger side length value which will be within the 1:1.06066 ratio of Prince Rupert’s Cube Problem. According to Prince Rupert, this means the new, larger volume cube, can actually pass through the original, smaller volume cube. By repeating this process, a series of sequentially larger volume cubes can be inserted into smaller volume cubes. If this series of equations is meant to be viewed as a related sequence, the answer to the question “What’s in the Box?” may be: a whole bunch of bigger boxes.

So there we have it.  This is a developing story and I will update this post as more information becomes avaliable.