The new Game Changer ARG just launched, but it’s not tied to the newly released season of the show. Instead, it’s a community challenge for backers of the Game Changer Home Edition Kickstarter campaign, which is itself playing out as a play-at-home edition of Game Changer, where the points actually do matter because they unlock additional upgrades to the game.

The current challenge: figure out how to leave a voicemail on the Game Changer Hotline. Sounds simple enough…but the challenge is actually a multi-layered puzzle adventure that asks players to do everything from escaping a virtual greenroom to identifying randomized clips from past episodes, on the fly.

…and yes, if you’re looking for answers, scroll to the bottom of the article and you’ll find a few.

Wait, “Welcome Back?” This Isn’t Game Changer’s First ARG?

Dropout’s hit variety show Game Changer is structured so that its players are presented with a completely different game show every episode, so it’s no surprise that this isn’t Game Changer‘s first puzzle rodeo. For the show’s fifth season, the show’s host Sam Reich (or rather, his evil magician counterpart Sam Dalton) locked three contestants in the show’s greenroom, forcing them to complete an escape room to free the real Sam Reich and escape with their lives intact.

Over the next few seasons, fans picked up on suspicious details and thought the show was running an alternate reality game on multiple occasions…a trend that continued until near the end of season 7, when the show finally did run an ARG by hiding a series of puzzles in playable minigames featured in prior episodes.

As players progressed through the game, they learned that frequent guest Brennan Lee Mulligan conspired with the video game developers to hide secret easter eggs in each of the games, culminating in the discovery of a secret phrase that would unlock a secret final episode after it was entered 100,000 times on a website. The result: the episode Samalamadingdong, where Sam Reich was subjected to an escape room of his own, riddled with references to past shows.

Game Changer Home Edition and the Game Within a Campaign

Shortly before Game Changer launched its eighth season, the Dropout team presented fans with yet another surprise: a crowdfunding campaign for a “home edition” of the game, featuring playable versions of three particularly beloved episodes of the show:

• Bingo (s06 e05), where players are trying to guess how other people will respond to prompts;
• Name a Number (s05 e04), where players bid on challenges before knowing what the numbered bids actually mean; and
• Sam Says (s04 e01, s05 e01, and s06 e03), a modified game of Simon Says designed to catch players in all sorts of clever loopholes.

Smosh and Parlor Room ran playthroughs of the home edition games to give fans a chance to see the home edition versions in action, and the campaign has already raised over $5.5M from over 38,000 backers as the campaign nears its June 6th cutoff date.

What makes this campaign particularly notable is that it acts as its own version of Game Changer, with daily prompts providing backers with multiple opportunities to play along at home. One early prompt, for example, asked something fairly simple: at least 300 players needed to give their name and phone number, no questions asked. Players who responded to that prompt were given a follow-up task yesterday, informing them that they would be getting phone calls from a number ending in -GAME within the next 24 hours. In order to score points, at least half of those called would need to answer the phone by saying, “Hello Game Changer, I’ve been here the whole time.” Over the past month fans have created edible arrangements of the Game Changer logo, submitted fake bird calls, written Sherlock Holmes fanfiction, and even replayed some of the minigames used for the original alternate reality game.

One of the key challenges with Kickstarter campaigns for projects with built-in audiences is the vast majority of the project’s most die-hard fans are going to back on day one…and while stretch goals offering new perks can help incentivize sharing the campaign, the most ardent supporters are left on the sidelines with nothing left to do.

Luckily, a number of crowdfunding campaigns solved this problem, by turning the campaign itself into a spectacle. Machine of Death did it by offering comedic backer tiers like the “Goat Stare” level (where goats would stare at your copy of the game before it’s mailed), while campaigns like Exploding Kittens gave fans lighthearted achievements to unlock. Many of the puzzle Kickstarter campaigns featured on ARGNet have used puzzles to keep early backers engaged, with Maze of Games hiding puzzles in interviews, and PostCurious added secret puzzle perks rewarding solvers with free pins or even a chance to get written into the game as a minor character.

The Game Changer Home Edition campaign has dabbled in a little of everything: to date, three backers have supported the campaign at the “Cuck” tier of support, where for $2,500 they get absolutely nothing from Dropout. At the same time, a number of challenges have tasked players with writing game prompts for Kickstarter Community expansions to the game. And then, there’s the puzzles. Which brings us to the Game Changer: Home Edition Challenge Hotline ARG itself.

How Hard Can It Be To Leave A Simple Voicemail?

Earlier today, the Game Changer: Home Edition campaign dropped a deceptively simple challenge: before Friday at 8pm PT, someone needs to leave a voicemail message on the Game Changer Challenge Hotline, available at US/Canada phone numbers, or through an online portal. As a reward for completion, players will earn 10 points to upgrade the final Game Changer take-home experience. Typically, Game Changer: Home Edition challenges have been worth between 1-3 points and are only intended to last for a single business day, so it can’t be as easy as calling up the number and getting patched through immediately.

So far, players have managed to penetrate three layers of the experience, with no strong sense of how far the rabbit hole goes. Again: if you’re looking for answers, they will be included at the bottom of the article.

The First Phase: Navigating the Phone Tree
The first layer is relatively straightforward, and can be tackled solo by most players. The phone tree presents a number of comedic options: a daily horoscope, a sincere apology from Grant O’Brien, samples of bird calls, a number of lighthearted operator help desks, and “behind the scenes access”.

The “Behind the Scenes Access” option provides a series of three factual questions drawing upon information scattered throughout the other menu options. Getting all three questions correct unlocks additional phone tree options.

The Second Phase: If At First You Don’t Succeed…

The next phase of the experience is a bit more open-ended, with three puzzles themed around the Aviary, Deja Vu, and the Greenroom. Completing each of these puzzles unlocks one third of a message that spells out the next step of the puzzle trail.

The Greenroom is a particularly poignant phase of the experience, as it recreates the Escape the Greenroom in audio format, tasking players with guiding Lily Du through a series of three virtual puzzle rooms that resolve to three-digit answers. It even has a surprise appearance from a tied up Sam Reich, reprising his role as damsel (or dapper dude) in distress. Putting together these clues gives a floor to hand off to the Elevator Operator, to reach the Top Floor.

The Third Phase: Name That Clip

After reaching the top floor, Game Changer fans are presented with a rapid-fire series of audio clips from prior episodes of the show, and are asked to identify which season and episode each clip came from. Only after getting three correct answers in a row are players…placed in “hold routing”.

Players are currently trying to puzzle through what to do next. At least one prior mission hinted that there might be something hidden, as the Survive the Maze challenge helpfully noted “while you’re escaping the maze, keep an eye o0ut for hidden secrets…there might still be something you missed the last time you went down there.”

Players are actively solving puzzles in the comments section of the Game Changer challenge, and on the r/Dropout subreddit. Both sources have been beyond helpful in compiling some of the below information, for those of you looking for solutions.

Note: in the time it took to write this article, a solution was found in the snares. However, additional audio clips have been added, and it now takes five correct answers to proceed.

Solutions and Helpful Resources

Phase 1:
Horoscope: the daily horoscope instructs you to transform all of the answers below.

Challenge 1: sum up Grant’s apologies to 12, and reverse it for 21
Challenge 2: check out the Surgical Operator and get 39 cc’s, reversed for 93
Challenge 3: check out the Forklift Operator and get the answer in pounds: convert to kilograms and get 298, and then reverse for 892

Phase 2:
The puzzles here can be found in Deja Vu (1 of 3), the Aviary (2 of 3), and the Greenroom (3 of 3).

Deja Vu: dial 66-71, and trigger “deja vu” messages with one word missing. Track what was removed and get the instruction switch / board / 4 / 1 / 2 / 8.
Enter that number with the Switchboard Operator and get go / top / is / zero / repeat / at

Aviary: Match the numbers mentioned in Bird Calls from the first phase with the birdcalls in the Aviary to get 6243.
Dial that in at The Aviary and get to / floor / nine / one / first / the

Greenroom: This is a series of three number based puzzles.
Room one: count the sides to get 586
Room two: follow the directions as indicated to spell out 926
Room three: use the T9 phone code to spell out ONE ZERO SEVEN
After that, Lily finds a slip of paper with the / it / two / and / digit / end

Stitching those parts as directed spells out go to the top floor it is nine two zero one and repeat first digit at end. Follow those directions and give the Elevator Operator the number 92019

Phase 3:
Below is an incomplete cheat sheet to work through the clip challenge, for the words that appeared in the first phase.

– …love child between The Grinch and Jared Kushner: 0104
– …how bad are Sam’s impressions: 0105
– …you can eat glue: 0202
– …cut this part so I sound cool: 0405
-…these motherfuckers have glasses: 0407
– …he best flavor: fruit punch: 0507
– …the finished product is disappointing but we had a good run: 0513
– …the 90s called they want a challenge tramp stamp
– …Christmas throne: 0703
– …getting fed grapes: 0708
– …Chainsmokers: 0710
– …I’m busting: 0801

Calacene created a more robust collaborative Google Doc collecting the full list posted to the Kickstarter comments, which appears to be drawing on the full Game Changer catalog of episodes.

I’ve been able to confirm that “2324” is the answer to the next step after making it through the hold music, unlocking the ability to leave a voicemail message, and the following congratulatory message.

The post Close Enough: Welcome Back, Game Changer ARG first appeared on ARGNet: Alternate Reality Gaming Network.

Last month, people started noticing a an advertisement for Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire popping up across the internet, advertising amazing deals on furniture. The only indication this wasn’t a low-budget, grainy commercial for a local furniture store is an A24 logo that pops up in the lower right corner of the spot towards the tail end of its run. This video kicked off the viral marketing campaign for the studio’s upcoming film The Backrooms, which releases this coming Friday. And over the past few weeks, the campaign has offered a number of chances for fans to “noclip” into the film’s world.

The Quick Backstory For The Backrooms

The Backrooms started its life as a creepy internet photograph of unknown provenance. The image depicts a seemingly abandoned retail space with yellowed wallpaper and carpeted flooring lit by the harsh fluorescent glare of the overhead lights. And for years, the photograph was passed around message boards without context as shorthand for “creepy liminal spaces”.

Eventually, the image would be posted to 4chan with the accompanying text, creating a basic vocabulary for The Backrooms:

If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms, where it’s nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in

God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you

A number of creators would return to this concept, but Kane Parsons (posting under Kane Pixels) in particular went on to create a series of videos expanding on the concept that would help define the aesthetic and rules of the world for fans. In this interpretation, The Backrooms is a parallel dimension filled with a seemingly endless maze of hallways and corridors, dotted with “Null Zones” that serve as semi-permeable barriers to clip in and out of the real world. The rules of time and space don’t behave the same in the Backrooms, and objects flowing through the Backrooms might reappear in our world at incongruous times.

According to Parsons’ interpretation, an organization known as the Async Research Institute discovered how to access The Backrooms decades ago. Over the years, the company sent employees in hazmat suits to explore the spaces, in much the same way the SCP Foundation uses Class-D personnel to research otherworldly dangers. Getting lost in the liminal spaces isn’t the only threat to these employees, as a number of dangerous lifeforms stalk the hallways of the Backrooms, including a bacterial entity often referred to as “The Lifeform”.

Finding the Backrooms, and the Move to the Silver Screen

While the original Backrooms photograph went unidentified for years, lost media fans gradually pieced together the photograph’s history, which appears to have been incorporated into the film itself. And that story starts in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, at 807 Oregon Street. Between 1958 – 1994, the address was home to Rohner’s Furniture, a small business that was a fixture in the town since as early as 1928. Rohner’s abandoned their furniture business in 1994 and the building was acquired by Hobbytown USA in 2003, when the company started blogging about their renovations efforts. One of those progress photos was the now iconic Backrooms photo. Recently, the Oshkosh Public Library created a video going through their own archives to help flesh out this story.

And so, when A24 partnered with Kane Parsons to turn his take on the Backrooms into a feature length film, he drew upon the photograph’s newly resurfaced provenance to place the film’s Null Zone bridge to the Backrooms inside Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire, a struggling furniture business. Transplanted from Oshkosh to San Jose California, the adaptation is nonetheless paying homage to the image’s history…a theme that comes up quite a bit, in the viral marketing campaign to follow.

The Viral Marketing Begins: Faxed Flyers and BBS Servers

A curious detail you might have picked up on from the Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire advertisement mentioned at the start of this article is that the icon number next to the phone number wasn’t a normal telephone. Instead, it was the icon for a fax machine. Dialing up the number with a fax machine printed out a flyer for The Backrooms‘ furniture store, dated May 17th, 1990, along with instructions to the store’s exact cross streets.

The address actually exists, and a few players took pilgrimages to the location to see if there was anything there. Somewhat fittingly, all they found was an abandoned building that used to be a Spirit Halloween. But at least at first, this particular trail seems to have been abandoned.

However, a few weeks later, the A24 store released a t-shirt for Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire featuring the same fax number. And after checking a second time, fans realized that the message printout changed to an advertisement for the South Bay Bulletin Board. The message, now dated May 18th, 1990, provided yet another number to call.

This second number led to an automated recording explaining that the South Bay bulletin board has been down since 1991, but an archived version could be found at 408bbsarchive.net. Just as the initial furniture ad referenced the Backrooms origin story as a renovated furniture store, this abandoned archived bulletin board quite literally called back to the image’s history of floating around message boards as creepypasta. And again, the fandom hit a dead-end, as the archived page only gave fans the chance to enter their contact information.

The Bulletin Board Expands, Tying in South Bay History to the Backrooms

Fans didn’t have to wait too long, however, as the 408 BBS Archive messaged registrants letting them know they were approved for access to the original message boards and directory. Some of the messages contained within provided hints about objects that “noclipped” into the Backrooms. Trash is popping up in the Fremont parking lot, and it’s attracting seagulls. A concerned citizen reported the repeated disappearance of a local stop sign. There’s even an invitation to a meeting at the Santa Clara City Hall that makes passing reference to “Reverchon Ventures”, an easter egg for Parsons’ other YouTube series, The Oldest View.

The centerpiece of the BBS update, however, was the events schedule for Recycle Bookstore, where Dr Mary Kline has a signing for her new book The Window Within scheduled. Recycle Bookstore still exists, BBS event listing references its old location, as that location was vacated in 1998.

Numerous hints have been made that Dr Mary Kline (played by Renate Reinsve) will be significant to the film, including a freeze-frame image of her book inserted into the film’s first trailer.

Backrooms Popups, Zines, and Async Null Zones (Oh My!)

A slightly more actionable discovery from the revised BBS site are two .TXT files, listed in the site directory: enter.txt, and access.txt. The former file became available with the site’s refresh, providing a link to enter.backrooms.mov, with no further context. The link led to a registration site for a Los Angeles area popup where fans could explore an immersive popup for the film. Shortly after, access.txt encouraged fans to buy tickets for the film at backrooms.mov, with the chance to purchase an exclusive “local 408” hat as a reward for using the secret link.

The special hat isn’t the only exclusive Backrooms merch on offer, as AAA24 members will be receiving The Yellow Wallpaper Zine, an A24 zine that hints it will feature a “surprise you’ll get to piece together”. There have even been reports of people dressed up in Async hazmat suits, marking up walls with tape to indicate the presence of Null Zones. The most recent of these sightings even featured another famous liminal space, photographed in 2019. In the video, an Async employee is taping up a wall at the real world location digitally recreated in Kane Parsons’ first Backrooms upload.

Hearkening Back to An Earlier Era in More Ways Than One

The viral campaign for The Backrooms has gone to great lengths to pay homage to the history of its source material, as well as the aesthetic of the time we’re noclipping into. Referencing the original photograph, The Backrooms promotions center around a struggling furniture store in the 1990s. As a nod to the photograph’s initial spread, fans are asked to explore an archived BBS server. And leaning in on the ephemeral nature of the internet, practically every location referenced has changed. The address for Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire might have been intended to point towards a Spirit Halloween. The bookstore featured in the BBS moved locations is now a cannoli catering company. Even the fax number itself has changed its output.

But the campaign also hearkens back to an earlier era of viral marketing. The Backrooms may not have used its promotional efforts to tell its own narrative, but it did invite fans to explore the aesthetic and world of the film while maintaining an in-universe facade. We’ve seen this quite a few times in the past…from the time Prometheus teased its film in 2012 by having Peter Weyland deliver a TED Talk in the far future that was 2023. And we’ve seen it when Girl with the Dragon Tattoo hid paintings from the film around the world. Both of these campaigns happened during the peak of MovieViral.com‘s operations, which focused just as much on campaigns looking to slightly extend the world of their films as ones looking to make full-blown alternate reality games.

And it seems like, at least in horror, we’re starting to see a resurgence of this type of marketing campaign, ranging from Undertone‘s narrative puzzle trail to Exit 8’s hunt for the Smiling Man through NYC subway stations.

And even if projects like this don’t rise to the level of alternate reality game, it’s exciting to see teams blending the line between fiction and reality a little, to help their stories come alive.

The post The Backrooms Viral Marketing Noclips Into An Earlier Era first appeared on ARGNet: Alternate Reality Gaming Network.

Jack Rogers and Norah Lane are getting married, and I was invited to attend their wedding reception! I don’t quite remember how I initially met them (it’s probably not important), but who can turn down a three-course dinner at Boston’s W Hotel to catch up with old friends. There’s even a few rumors going around that the bride might have designed a puzzle hunt for attendees, in lieu of a whirl around the dance floor.

Jack and Norah’s wedding reception is the central event for The Wedding Party, a dinner theater escape room initially created by Canadian Caper, as a popup event in 2015. The show has been running in Toronto since 2023 when Secret City Adventures adapted it into a more persistent experience, and recently expanded the show’s theatrical footprint to Vancouver and Boston. The show uses the structure of a wedding reception to deliver an experience that’s one part immersive theater, one part escape room with just a hint of live action roleplaying for attendees looking to lean into the experience.

Meeting (and Exceeding) Expectations: Building Narrative Scaffolding Around A Wedding

Most people reading this article have been to a wedding reception before, so the narrative beats and expectations of a wedding reception should be familiar. The evening starts out with the key members of the wedding party greeting attendees at the door, graciously accepting well wishes and engaging in light banter before ushering them into the banquet hall, offering hints of their highly distinct personalities.

Guests are encouraged to grab a drink at the cash bar, or settle in for the appetizer course before the wedding party offers up impassionate (and informative) wedding speeches that cement their characters in attendees’ minds, before the main course is served. While attendees eat, the wedding party runs a circuit across the tables engaging in light banter, before the main event: a puzzle hunt designed by the bride, with the goal of finishing up an hour later for dessert and the traditional cake cutting. If teams found themselves stuck at any point, the wedding party was on hand to offer the occasional nudge.

The Wedding Party‘s structure did an exceptional job of easing attendees into the experience. Brief introductions to the wedding party set the stage for a show that encouraged interactions with the cast, while the wedding speeches set up a few clues for the central narrative without asking much of attendees beyond enjoying the show. And the tableside visits provided a purely optional low-stakes opportunity to test the cast’s improv skills before the puzzle event commences.

Norah’s Puzzle Hunt: Elegant Puzzles That Promise Something For Everyone

Norah’s puzzle hunt is the central activity for the evening, challenging attendees to work together as tables of six to solve a series of seven puzzles. Each puzzle is unlocked by approaching a member of the wedding party and greeting them with the codephrase, “that was a lovely ceremony“, once the puzzle hunt begins. Some wedding party members have pen-and-paper puzzles to complete, while others might give a challenge for participants to complete.

After completing each of the seven challenges, tables are encouraged to enter their answers on a custom website, at which point…something happens that answers a few lingering questions about the event, and a new series of puzzles are unlocked. The night I attended, practically every table reached that first checkpoint, and at least half of all tables made it through the full suite of puzzles – a particularly impressive accomplishment considering this was a media night, and familiarity with puzzles varied from table to table.

Knowing the city’s reputation for puzzle fans, the Boston location also featured an extra set of bonus puzzles to uncover one final reveal before the cake-cutting so that even the most die-hard puzzlers barely finished in time.

For those who don’t consider themselves to be puzzle inclined, it’s worth noting that when I’m using the term “puzzles” to describe The Wedding Party‘s challenges, that definition is highly flexible. Before the night was over, I found myself investigating event decor, grilling wedding party members for information, and even delivering an impromptu speech myself to help get all the information our table needed to arrive at the correct answer at the end. And it is possible to see The Wedding Party on your own, but as the puzzle hunt’s teams of six are determined by your table, it’ll likely be more fun if you take at least one friend along for the ride.

A Taste of Drosselmeyer: The Green Door Labs Connection

If The Wedding Party sounds structurally similar to Boston’s other marquis immersive puzzle event Club Drosselmeyer, that’s no coincidence. While Secret City Adventures initially created the event for the Toronto market, they partnered with Club Drosselmeyer creators Green Door Labs to bring the show stateside, and there’s considerable overlap in casts between the two shows. In explaining the collaboration’s origin story, Kellian Adams Pletcher notes,

The Wedding Party was not written by me. It was written by our friend Errol Elumir, and it’s a great show…and actually, the show is an awful lot like Drosselmeyer in the way that it’s set up. And so there’s this sort of puzzle-play format that is starting to coalesce that I’m really excited about. And the thing that I’m even more excited about, this puzzle-play format can’t live if I’m the only person in the world who writes it…

…which is why I’m really excited when other people build beautiful work that I care about and I’m excited about and that I want to produce. And Errol is only the first of many other people whose work I would really like to produce here in Boston.

Club Drosselmeyer‘s take on that puzzle-play format is a bit more open-ended in its design than The Wedding Party. Attendees of the former event can choose to treat the World War II era Nutcracker adaptation as a themed period party, joining a dance floor filled with swing dancers as they dance to a live band, or sitting back and enjoying a series of live performances. At the same time, puzzlers chase down a cast of over a dozen characters, solving puzzles and completing tasks to influence the night’s events at a breakneck pace.

The Wedding Party guides its attendees through a more linear experience, focusing on an immersive theater experience for the first half of the evening followed by a puzzle event for the second half. But with slightly larger teams and a three-course dinner to break things up, The Wedding Party ultimately feels a bit more leisurely an experience, even if it does have enough puzzles to keep even the most voracious solvers occupied and surprised until the final moment.

I’ve always viewed Club Drosselmeyer as the perfect way to introduce puzzle fans to live action role playing, as the format leans heavily on puzzles but stealthily rewards players for leaning in on the role-playing. The Wedding Party is targeting a slightly different crowd, by delivering an alternative to the murder mystery dinner party format. Deductive reasoning and investigation is still a major part of the gameplay experience, but leaning more heavily on puzzles to reveal a carefully constructed scenario makes for something that can fairly and reliably be solved over the course of an evening.

There aren’t many shows like The Wedding Party, and it’s worth checking out to experience a fresh take on the murder mystery dinner party format. It’s also an important experiment in socializing access to immersive puzzle events. Immersive theater has seen some of its main shows franchised out in the past, with Punchdrunk shows like Viola’s Room making its way from London to the United States and Sleep No More franchising out to Shanghai and Seoul. Escape rooms have expanded to multiple locations through franchise expansions and location transplants.

But the “puzzle-play” format hasn’t had many opportunities to build out local markets with multiple offerings. And hopefully this will be one of many to come.

Bookings Available For a Limited Time…For Now

While The Wedding Party has been running in Toronto since 2023, Boston’s engagement at the W Hotel is currently limited, with showtimes most Friday and Saturday nights through June 13th. And while the $149 price point is on the pricier side for immersive experiences, there aren’t many shows that bundle a three-course meal into the ticket price and the event ends up feeling like an intimate affair by the time the grand finale takes place.

Toronto and Vancouver have been extended to run through August 30th with showtimes on Saturday and Sunday. Reservations for all three locations can be made at Secret City Adventures’ dedicated page for The Wedding Party.

Note: ARGNet received a comped ticket to The Wedding Party.

EDITED 05/19 TO ADD: The Wedding Party has been extended through August 2nd, in Boston.

The post This Boston Wedding Party Takes “Save the Date” Literally first appeared on ARGNet: Alternate Reality Gaming Network.

Back in November, ARGNet covered Searching for a World That Doesn’t Exist, a modern reinterpretation of Robert Chambers’ The King in Yellow through the lens of a Minecraft Let’s Play video. This reframing of the classic horror story is particularly fitting, as the titular King in Yellow isn’t a typical eldritch horror. Instead, it’s a play capable of driving those exposed to it mad, serving as an early instance of cognitohazards.

Searching for a World That Doesn’t Exist ended with the protagonist Derek (playing under the handle d3rlord3) encountering the King in Yellow offscreen, and offering one final warning to protect Avery (TheMostMayo) from repeating his mistakes. And for a few months, that was where the series creator Wifies left things. But earlier this month, Wifies released the second part of his duology, Destroying A World That Doesn’t Exist.

As with the prior installation, Wifies’ two hour long video offered a summary of a considerably longer source material – this time, a fifteen hour long upload to Avery’s YouTube channel. But while the prior video was primarily told through Derek’s perspective, the first half of Destroying A World That Doesn’t Exist is told from a considerably more naive perspective.

Avery’s Perspective: Following in D3rlord3’s Footsteps

The first installment of Wifies’ King in Yellow reimagining starts with the warning, “whatever you do, at the crossroads, don’t turn left.” And as we finally begin to see Avery’s exploration of the world, he ignores these instructions and attempts to follow in D3rlord3’s footsteps. But when Avery crosses the threshold of the giant golden door, instead of being confronted with unseen horrors, he’s confronted by a single gold block…until turning around and finding himself in a room filled with doors.

Behind each door, Avery finds himself thrust into a different world, littered with signs of D3rlord3’s prior passage – items from his inventory appear like a trail of breadcrumbs, guiding Avery through puzzles he doesn’t quite understand. The first world he stumble across, for example, is a series of precarious mountain spires connected by wooden bridges. Upon crossing each bridge, mountains appear and disappear with no explanation. On one occasion, the only thing saving Avery from falling to his virtual death is a series of blocks previously placed by D3rlord3.

That is not to say that Avery isn’t engaging with his environment: in one world, he comes across a towering obelisk, with strange glyphs written on it, and recognizes the puzzle in place: “bro is speaking enchanting table”. And he’s right – the bricks spell out a message in Minecraft’s Galactic Alphabet, which often appears alongside the game’s enchantment table. The upper portion of the obelisk starts with – — – , the pattern used in the Galactic Alphabet for “end of sentence”. This provides a hint that the cigils need to be flipped upside down and reversed to be legible, resulting in the message “BELOW”.

Avery proceeds through many of these elaborately designed worlds and eventually finds the doorway leading to the next, guided by a trail of items. Sometimes, viewers can intuit the way forward themselves. In a world blanketed by a sea of red rolling hills, the landscape is broken up by a series of white houses. Avery focuses on the items inside the houses, missing the giant tiled arrows placed on the floor of each house, directing him where to go. Eventually it’s a crafting table in the distance that leads Avery to his next location. Only this table couldn’t have been placed by D3rlord3, since it appeared out of nowhere. There’s something else leaving a path of breadcrumbs for Avery to follow.

One particularly insidious world almost halts Avery’s journey entirely. Slightly over 2 hours into the raw footage, after navigating a series of underground canals, Avery stumbles across a cozy world occupied by a single church. A Yellow Sign often serving as harbinger of the King in Yellow hangs above the pew, and a book at the altar reassures Avery he’s safe here. And for the next twelve hours, Avery silently tends to the church. It’s only until he reads a sign left by D3rlord3 that he is broken from his reverie and proceeds onward.

That is not to say that Avery has no personal agency in progressing forward: one particularly intricate puzzle appears in the center of a lake in between six statues. Avery “solves” the puzzle by spending four minutes breaking through the netherite block that acts as the lock, before typing “stupid puzzle” into chat. Finally, around halfway through the video, Avery encounters D3rlord3. And during that conversation, he’s provided a link to the events leading up to their encounter, from Derek’s perspective, although the video has since been “deleted”.

Derek’s Perspective: Traversing Worlds and Solving the Unsolvable

After Wifies pulls up D3rlord3’s footage, viewers learn that Derek’s confrontation with the King in Yellow at the end of the prior chapter left him a shell of himself, incapable of looking away from his computer. And yet, he’s still capable of tackling the puzzles left in the worlds he’s exploring. Interrogating the rules of the world filled with mountainous spires, D3rlord3 figures out that the mountains operate as a variant of Conway’s Game of Life. Drawing on exhaustive knowledge of Minecraft game mechanics, D3rlord3 manipulates his game settings to reveal the intended solution to the puzzle at the center of the lake.

And after catching up with his encounter with Avery, D3rlord3 comes face to face with the physical manifestation of the King in Yellow: a pair of yellow orbs. The King in Yellow reveals his plan to enter the real world using Avery as a vessel, and discards D3rlord now that his purpose has been served. Up to this point, the puzzles were designed to be solvable. Whether by D3rlord3’s intellectual progression through the worlds or Avery’s assisted path, the King in Yellow wanted the pair to progress, so he could escape. But D3rlord3 served his purpose, and the King in Yellow transports him to a world with a closed golden door, with no intended path out.

There is no puzzle to be solved here – and yet, D3rlord3 takes advantage of esoteric details of how Minecraft works to glitch himself through the floor, where he finds a secret door that leads him to an abandoned village from a prior civilization that summoned the King in Yellow. And it’s in this village that D3rlord3 finds a book that helps him come up with a plan to prevent the King in Yellow’s influence from spreading, leading to a dramatic confrontation with a virtual manifestation of the cognitohazard.

It’s worth noting that this wasn’t fans’ first encounter with the abandoned village, nor was it their first time witnessing Wifies’ interpretation of the King in Yellow’s Minecraft manifestation. For that, we need to turn back to Minecraft Live.

Wifies Launched A King in Yellow Prequel ARG at Minecraft Live
Minecraft Live is an annual virtual event put on by Mojang Studios, offering a sneak peek at the company’s plans for the next year. For their March update, the company announced new game updates, real world activations, and even an upcoming Minecraft theme park. As part of the leadup to the main event with Mojang, Wifies recorded a brief explainer of his channel, which got interrupted by two mysterious robed figures.

Wifies went on to elaborate, “I think easily one of my favorite things about solving these mysteries is the fun of solving puzzles and working with my community to unravel these insane worlds that shouldn’t even exist. In fact, in this very segment and everything you’ve seen so far there are clues hidden for you, the viewer, to find. So if you’re curious, and you want to figure out what’s really happening, that the answer is out there. Waiting for you.” At the end of the video, a central URL for the game appeared: Wifies.net/MCLive, along with some enchanting table text leading to rules for the ARG, structured around five puzzles.

The five puzzles unlocked a series of audio logs investigating why a house appeared in their village, framed as a series of interviews conducted by someone named Epsilon. During the investigation, details begin to emerge: the town is preparing to summon the King in Yellow, using one of their own, Abel, as his vessel. One of Abel’s brothers, Ianius, begins to have misgivings about the summoning. And in the final video, we see video of him disappearing from the town and facing the King in Yellow’s physical manifestation – a giant floating eyeball.

This confrontation is inevitably why no one in the town except for Abel remembers him, and why “House 31” seemingly appeared from nowhere: it’s been there all along, they just forgot who used to live there. Ianius’ reservations also make him a likely source for the book D3rlord3 finds buried

Did Playing This ARG Qualify As A Cognitohazard?

In ARGNet’s prior article on Searching For A World That Doesn’t Exist, I mentioned how Wifies’ ARG subverted the nature of how we consume media through its strategic use of the Let’s Play format. The sequel doubled down on this clever subversion: at the time of this article, Searching For A World That Doesn’t Exist has 25 million views, and its sequel has 15 million views. And for the bulk of that viewtime, watching the events unfold is a passive experience: follow the breadcrumbs left by Avery that were left for him by both D3rlord3 and the King in Yellow himself.

A portion of the audience didn’t stop at Wifies’ explainer videos, however. Since the full 15 hour behind the gates video was uploaded directly to AveryTheMayo’s YouTube channel instead of hidden in a Google Drive folder, for instance, we now know that people opted to explore a more unfiltered experience over 1.6 million times, implying as many as 10% of viewers went on to expose themselves to a more unfiltered version of the cognitohazard. Luckily, the choice of also sifting through D3rlord3’s footage was taken from us. On D3rlord3’s Google Drive, a PDF entitled Notice of Removal states:

The footage in the folder belonging to ‘Derek Hutchins’ has been temporarily seized for investigation by the US D.M.S.. We thank you for your patience.

The United States Department of Metaphysical Sciences (US D.M.S.) intervened during some of Wifies’ earlier coverage, and shielded the more curious from engaging with some of the King in Yellow’s more overt manifestations.

Players who engaged at this level spent a significant amount of time engaging with Wifies’ world, but the nature of that engagement still resembles Avery’s approach more than Derek’s. Luckily, time spent alone isn’t enough to drive one to madness: after all, the footage confirms that Avery spent over 12 hours hanging around a church of the Yellow Sign and was still considered an ideal vessel, while Derek’s mind was fractured beyond repair after a brief attempt to comprehend the King in Yellow.

A select audience did run the risk of a more direct attempt at comprehending the King in Yellow with the Minecraft Live alternate reality game, however. In it, Wifies directly challenged his audience to both solve his series of puzzles, and piece together why “House 31” suddenly appeared in the middle of a village of cultists worshipping the King in Yellow. Making things worse, they were encouraged to directly enter Minecraft to solve the puzzle, bringing them closer to the place where this interpretation of the King in Yellow was looking to tempt the curious with his (game)play.

Far fewer people took the extra steps capable of bringing them closer to madness, of course – the final audio log has been viewed just shy of 20,000 views, to date. It’s much more tempting to have it all explained, with Freshi’s walkthrough of the ARG receiving over 400,000 views. But their efforts left a trail of breadcrumbs for others to follow, offering up more potential vessels for the King in Yellow.

This also offers up an interesting interpretation of D3rlord3’s seemingly triumphant confrontation with the King in Yellow at the end of the series. His ultimate plan involved offering up his corrupted mind as vessel for the King in Yellow, allowing for mutually assured destruction. And at first, we see that plan working, with the King in Yellow’s physical manifestation disintegrating…until Avery returns, offering up a far more attractive vessel. With his return, dozens of eyes appear, hungry for a new home.

D3rlord3 eventually takes Avery out of the equation…but even without Avery, wouldn’t one of the millions of viewers Wifies brought to the table with his video offer up a tempting vessel to help the King in Yellow (and his story) live on?

None of These Styles of Gameplay Are Wrong

It’s tempting to look at this article’s comparison of Avery and D3rlord3 and assume that one of their playstyles is better than the other – that there’s something inherently superior about being part of the vanguard unlocking (and sometimes even directing) the story for those to follow after. That couldn’t be further from the truth, and I’ve previously argued in favor of designing with the casual spectator in mind.

If watching a video explaining the events of an ARG is enough for you to enjoy it? That’s great, and hopefully the broader context of how it came to be helped contribute to that enjoyment. If what you see makes you curious enough to do a little digging and skim through the game to see if there’s something the summary missed? That’s great too, and hopefully you end up feeling like those efforts were rewarding. And if you start poking around at puzzles or writing guides to help others navigate the game’s complex web? You guessed it: that’s great as well.

If you’re interested in watching Wifies’ reimagining of The King in Yellow, check out part 1 and part 2. For more on the Minecraft Live ARG, Freshi’s explainer video is a great start, and the ARG’s Google Doc can help fill in the missing details.

The post Return of the King in Yellow Minecraft ARG first appeared on ARGNet: Alternate Reality Gaming Network.

It’s January 16th, and I’m sitting in a classroom on the MIT campus. Hours earlier, I joined thousands of puzzlers attending a paranormal research conference called CRYPTIC, where an intrepid researcher named Burnham proved that cryptids do exist…but in the process, opened up a rift to another world that threatened our very existence. The only way to close the rift and save the world: befriend that world’s puzzle monsters (PuzzMon) to save the world. This is the 2026 MIT Mystery Hunt, an annual puzzle event that attracted over 5,000 puzzlers to spend a long weekend tackling a series of wildly creative puzzles.

Shortly after the conference, the PuzzMon.world website went live. By the time the evening rolled around, our team had already solved a handful of puzzles. I had just come off working on a puzzle themed around fanfiction tropes and the Omegaverse, and took a break from puzzles to explore the world of PuzzMon through a fully playable 16-bit video game world to unlock more puzzles for our team.

All of a sudden, two teammates settle down at my table and dump a box of black jigsaw puzzle pieces on the table, and start slowly matching pieces. I ask them what they’re working on: they explain it’s a puzzle called Starry Night. This is more interesting than what I was working on, so I drop everything and join them. Curious, I ask: “our team was given a set of two blacklights in our team’s welcome kit…do you think there’s secretly UV ink on the puzzle?”

My suspicion was correct: there was secretly UV ink on the puzzle pieces, and under the right lighting the puzzle is much easier to complete. In under an hour we have a fully assembled jigsaw puzzle, covered in ultraviolet stars and astrological signs. But that’s only the first step of the puzzle, and for the next hour or so we would try and figure out how to connect the dots to transform those hidden symbols into a word or phrase that is the final solution to the puzzle.

Puzzles at the MIT Mystery Hunt can take just about any form, so over the event’s 45 year history the teams running the event have used it as a platform to push the limits of what a puzzle can be. And because the prize for a team winning the MIT Mystery Hunt is the responsibility for running the next year’s hunt, every team has a slightly different answer to what that spectacle entails. For 2026, the puzzles themselves served as center for the spectacle. But be warned, as this article will spoil puzzle mechanics of a number of puzzles for those looking to solve after the fact.

This Puzzle Has Been Here The Whole Time: The Art of the Cameo
One of the earlier puzzles in this year’s Mystery Hunt is titled This Puzzle Was Here the Whole Time, and guided players through a series of puzzles referencing episodes of Dropout’s hit variety show Game Changer. The initial phase of the puzzle featured four mini-puzzles that used mechanics referencing back to those episodes, resulting in an instruction to search for a particular phrase.

The top result for that query was a review of Escape the Greenroom (an escape room themed episode) on the blog Room Escape Artist, with three seemingly incongruous images added to the review. Overlaying those images over the prior puzzles spelled out a message, leading to a particularly fitting answer: CAMBRIDGE. Entering that word into the hunt’s answer checker didn’t solve the puzzle, however. Instead, it triggered a link to an unlisted YouTube video for teams, with a message from Dropout CEO and Game Changer host Sam Reich, himself.

Buried in Reich’s snarky response is a cryptic clue instructing solvers on the final step necessary to find the puzzle’s true solution. Amusingly, the puzzle’s solution document notes its initial design had to be scrapped because those elements were used to launch an actual Game Changer ARG, last year.

This Puzzle Was Here the Whole Time highlights two of the ways many hunt teams chase spectacle in puzzle design: enlisting nerdy celebrities to make puzzle cameos, and finding unexpected places to hide puzzles.

In making a cameo in a puzzle themed around his own show, Sam Reich has joined an impressive line of nerdy celebrities who made cameos in past Mystery Hunts. In 2022, Weird Al Yankovic congratulated puzzlers on completing a cooking-themed metapuzzle themed around his music. In 2024, Barenaked Ladies frontman Ed Robertson offered a similar congratulatory message for a puzzle based around one of their songs. Even former American National Standards Institute chairman Oliver Smoot joined in on the fun, narrating the 2020 puzzle Tall Tales as a nod to the time in college he established his own height as the unit of measurement for a campus bridge.

However, it’s not just about sneaking celebrities into puzzles: it’s also a question of where puzzles can be hidden. Room Escape Artist isn’t the only place Mystery Hunt puzzles have been hidden. Alex Rosenthal took advantage of his relationship with TED to hide secret puzzles in both TED-Ed videos as well as a TED talk he delivered on puzzle hunts, while Cards Against Humanity co-founder Josh Dillon helped print up a custom set of official game cards for a Mystery Hunt event.

Even reference sites for the MIT Mystery Hunt have been retrofitted into puzzles: in the puzzle Haddock Walk, a puzzle created a mirrored version of the MIT Mystery Hunt puzzle database with slight changes made to serve as base for a puzzle.

Lets Get Physical: The Care and Feeding of Voracious Puzzlers
The Starry Night puzzle was a particularly involved answer of how physical puzzles can be used to create spectacle. The Boxaroo team that made the puzzle published a write-up of how that puzzle came to be, from ideation to mass production. But spectacle in physical puzzles doesn’t always involve high production costs: for this year’s puzzle Da’ Bomb, spectacle centered around watching teammates make poor life choices.

Setup for the puzzle was relatively simple: teams were provided with a series of ten numbered plastic cups with hot sauces, and charged with identifying the sauces and pairing them up with ten audio clips pulled from episodes of Hot Ones, with Sean Evans. The goal: identify the hot sauces used, look up their ingredient lists, and use the spice scale at the bottom of the puzzle page to “extract” an answer. And while a large part of the spectacle of Da’ Bomb involved watching teammates tenderly dab droplets of hot sauce on their tongues with toothpicks, even the puzzle’s liability waiver got into the fun, comedically noting that:

Da’ undersigned acknowledges that they are voluntarily choosing to consume products that may contain a high concentration of capsaicin (up to one million scoville units). Some of these sauces are significantly hotter than standard culinary spices and can cause:

• Intense mouth, throat, and stomach pain.
• Physical reactions such as sweating, nausea, lightheadedness, and shortness of breath.
• Irritation to da’ eyes or skin if touched after contact.
• Being part of “The Best Da’ Bomb Reactions of YYYY” compilations.

The physical care and feeding of teammates was mirrored with the virtual care and feeding of a Puzzmon. For the puzzle Novelty Store, teams were gifted with a virtual TaMITgochi pet, highly reminiscent of the retro Bandai toy. Proper care and feeding unlocked a series of dance moves for the pet, which spelled out a secret message.

This particular breed of spectacle at the MIT Mystery Hunt has been a popular form of oneupmanship, with build teams competing for the most impressive puzzle artifacts. Last year, much of the hunt centered around a custom radio, while the 2018 hunt’s puzzle Marked Deck produced a custom deck of playing cards featuring a layered, 3-dimensional rendering of the cover of Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon when the cards are sorted in the correct order. Prior Mystery Hunts have produced everything from self-published books like The Puzzle at the End of This Book and Send Yourself Swanlumps to custom playable pinball machine with Game to Be Themed Later.

Prioritizing Puzzle Rounds As Source of Spectacle
While the 2026 MIT Mystery Hunt featured spectacle of many different types, the biggest impact it will likely leave is in how heavily spectacle featured into entire puzzle rounds. Understanding what makes this so impressive requires an understanding of how puzzle hunts are typically constructed.

When designing puzzle hunts, teams will typically start by building out puzzle rounds, since restrictions built into the solving process for metapuzzles often rely on imposing restrictions against the individual puzzles that “feed” into them. Sometimes, those restrictions can even dictate other elements of round design. One example of this constraint in action can be found in the 2019 Mystery Hunt round Thanksgiving and Halloween, which required answers to include the letters A/B/O in a specific order, as a reference to blood types. To practically make that happen, an individual puzzle constructor might be instructed to write a puzzle with a solution that includes the letters BOB in that specific order. Just as likely, they might be assigned the solution SUBPROBLEM for a thematically appropriate puzzle they pitched to the puzzle editors.

Some puzzle types, however, don’t just dictate what the answer of a puzzle might resolve to, but a core structural element of the entire puzzle round. For the MIT Mystery Hunt I helped construct in 2024, my teammate Joseph DeVincentis constructed the meta A Rift in Hades to create a series of interdependent puzzles, so that each individual puzzle had six different solutions. This type of meta construction doesn’t just place restrictions on what puzzle answers look like, it adds restrictions to what the “feeder puzzles” themselves look like.

The MIT Mystery Hunt will often have a few rounds that are pressing the boundaries of what hunt structure looks like. But for the 2026 Mystery Hunt, practically every round in the second half of the hunt came with constraints that pressed the boundaries of what a puzzle round might look like, while at the same time imposing considerable restrictions on the types of puzzles that might live in that round. Below are some of the more impressive feats of puzzle meta construction.

One of the first non-traditional puzzle rounds to confront solvers was The Land with No Name: a round of 26 puzzles where every puzzle corresponds with a letter in the alphabet. Even the text on puzzle pages remains obscured in a sea of question marks. The only way to unlock the missing letters across the 26 puzzle pages is to solve the corresponding puzzle. Initial entry points like an emoji-laden Celeste puzzle (which unlocks the letter “M” across all puzzles in the round after solving it) made it possible to reveal a few initial letters, but identifying which puzzles are potentially solvable at any given point are as much of the challenge of this round as anything else.

Fate’s Thread Casino round challenged teams to pull for puzzle fragments across five different categories. Pulling against the Characters banner, for instance, pulled anime trading cards associated with either the puzzle Hear Me Out, or the puzzle Goku. The first step of the puzzle involved figuring out which puzzle pieces go with which puzzle, using hints provided in the Quests section to figure out each puzzle’s mechanics.

The Terminus round tasked solvers with hopping between dimensions to unlock puzzles across six different categories. Navigating to dimensions in the central terminal that met specific criteria would unlock puzzles from different dimensions offering puzzles following a highly specific theme. For instance, puzzles mapping back to the sixth dimension explored different methods of deconstructing crossword puzzles, asking “can you really call it a crossword if” there were no clues, no words, or no crosses. Offering a similar deconstruction, puzzles mapping back to the fourth dimension challenged solvers to identify popular terms based on their various trend lines, ranging from financial stock prices to Google Trends data on searches for numbers.

The hunt’s pièce de résistance, however (and that is a modest hint to the meta), was the Atlas of Mosaics round. The puzzle starts out simple: place lettered tiles on a hexagonal grid in response to crossword-style clues, but subsequent rounds get increasingly creative with their use of hexagonal tiles. At first, it starts simple: in addition to letters, colored tiles are added to the solving repertoire, like the section of “Identification” pictured above. Progressively, hexagonal tiles are placed by increasingly creative methods. How are popular celebrities related to each other? What’s the answer to a superhero themed murder mystery, with evidence ranging from progressive heat map scans of the scene of the crime to interrogations with four of the suspects? And how on earth do you cope with a grid that has colored dots moving across the hexagonal panels?

With over a hundred hexagonal sections organized across 12 different thematic rounds, the Atlas of Mosaics round is an in-depth exploration of the many different types of puzzles that can be fit into a hexagonal grid, with a metapuzzle reveal that justifies why teams were tasked with creating such an expansive grid. And while it’s comparatively easier to talk about how puzzle hunts can create spectacle through celebrity guest appearances or impressive technical builds, there’s something truly awe-inspiring about puzzle rounds that make you rethink the very nature of puzzles.

Whether that’s a puzzle that decides your access to the alphabet is a privilege to be earned, or one that maps out an entire world one hexagonal tile at a time.

Special Mention: Devilish Devilries
One of the innovations added to MIT Mystery Hunt structure from the 2025 hunt was the introduction of brief descriptions of feeder puzzles, since teams were given the opportunity to choose which puzzles to unlock. That tradition continued in 2026 for earlier rounds, with one notable evolution that persisted throughout the full hunt: puzzles were given iconographic indicators when they required MIT presence to solve, and “spicier” puzzles were given mature content warnings. And no puzzle earned that flag more than Devilish Devilries, which reduced my team’s MIT headquarters into fits of laughter.

As the puzzle title implies, the puzzle is comprised of a series of printer’s devilries, with a particularly spicy twist. For instance, one exchange starts out: “I am deed to see you well. / It was just a min. Omen Tim feeling better.” While the sentence as presented is somewhat incomprehensible, adding two words into the exchange makes things much clearer:

“I am de[light]ed to see you well. It was just a min.O[r ail]ment.”

The step that followed the discovery of the phrase LIGHT RAIL is what earned the puzzle its mature rating, while reducing our team to a classroom of immature middle schoolers.

Spectacle Through the Breadth and Depth of Puzzling
As is often the case with the MIT Mystery Hunt, even this lengthy overview only captures a small portion of the puzzles featured in the hunt. And that acts as its own form of spectacle. The hunt’s wrap-up page highlights some impressive stats, with over five thousand puzzlers tackling the hunt’s 232 puzzles while also completing almost a hundred scavenger hunt style “tasks” that this article didn’t even adequately address. Even that understates the sheer scope of the hunt, with teams placing over a quarter million hexagonal tiles over the course of the hunt.

To explore the hunt yourself, go to Puzzmon.world and explore it yourself: you don’t have to catch ’em all, but it’s definitely worth checking out a few corners of the game, whether that means an idle exploration of the underlying video game or attempting to solve the first few rounds of Atlas of the Mosaic. The Atlas of the Mosaic round in particular makes a great accessible entry into variety puzzling for the first few grid segments.

Since Providence won the 2026 MIT Mystery Hunt, they will be spending the next year creating the hunt for 2027, with their own unique view of what “spectacle” means. And I look forward to seeing what emerges.

The post Gotta Catch ‘Em All: The MIT Mystery Hunt as Puzzle-Based Spectacle first appeared on ARGNet: Alternate Reality Gaming Network.

During the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl Salesforce released a TV spot promising a $1M prize to the first to solve a puzzle hunt in collaboration with Jimmy Donaldson, who runs the MrBeast YouTube channel and media empire. The commercial itself, centering around Slack’s “Slackbot” assistant, is a veritable whirlwind of codes and references, culminating in a bird’s eye view of a QR code driving to MrBeast.Salesforce.com. Luckily, early teaser content linked on the Million Dollar Puzzle page helps point prospective solvers to a few helpful starting points to help make sense of the seemingly herculean puzzling task.

Lone Shark Games confirmed their involvement in helping design puzzles for the event. And while this is the company’s first Super Bowl commercial, they have developed a number of high profile, spectacle-laden puzzle experiences in the past. Wired enlisted them to help run a month long nationwide manhunt for one of their journalists. Cards Against Humanity turned to them for a puzzle hunt leading to a safe filled with hundreds of thousands of Sloth cards locked up on a remote island whimsically renamed “Hawaii 2”. The company even took over the third floor of Washington DC’s Planet Word Museum to create Lexicon Lane, a series of 26 separate puzzle adventures making use of the same space.

Luckily, the contest site implies MrBeast and Lone Shark Games’ penchant for spectacle should continue through this puzzle hunt, noting that “clues are everywhere: videos, websites, and the real world. Anytime you see MrBeast with Salesforce, assume there’s something there.”

Road to the Big Game: Setting the Stage for a Puzzle Hunt

It all started with a tweet: back in December, Donaldson tweeted out a request: “I’ve been sitting on an amazing Super Bowl commercial idea for years. I know it’s random but someone please let me make your brand’s Super Bowl commercial so I can finally make this idea happen”. Shortly after, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff replied, offering up their commercial. This kicked off a flurry of promotional teasers. Donaldson then shared a behind the scenes look at his pitch process. His employees discussed how they use Slack (a Salesforce product) as a pillar of their content production processes. Donaldson even made a Freleng Door Gag inspired video teasing the spectacle of the upcoming spot, as well as a teaser commercial themed around taking the $1M prize money out of the bank.

The $1M puzzle hunt may have only officially kicked off with Salesforce’s fourth quarter ad spot, but those videos contained more than a few clues to give astute puzzlers a head start on the solving. Some of these leads (including the name of Donaldson’s fictional bank) appear to be red herrings. An extended acrostic that flashes in one spot, for instance, teases solvers with the message “this means nothing I just wanted to waste your time lol”. But other moments seem considerably more intentional. Why is there a conspicuously placed barcode on the armored tank receiving a parking violation, during Donaldson’s bank visit? And why does the teller have a series of dates circled in red on all of her desk calendars?

The real entry point to the puzzling, however, is a pinned comment on the teaser video linking to a playlist of nine past MrBeast videos. The pinned comment on each of those videos now links to a series of variety puzzles.

For example, a comment on Beast Philanthropy’s Changing the Lives of 600 Strangers video directs puzzlers to a Sudoku variant puzzle posted on Reddit, using the nine letters in LIF(E)CHANGE instead of numbers. Solving that grid on its own doesn’t lead to any additional instructions…but is there a different piece of information that can instruct solvers on which letters to pay attention to?

Solving the variety puzzle is only the first step of this particular puzzle. And while all the information to solve the puzzle could be provided in the initial image, information on which letters to select from the completed 9×9 grid might also emerge through other parts of the campaign. And that guidance could come from practically anywhere: supplemental videos, other puzzles, or even some as-yet-unrevealed real world spectacle.

As for the Super Bowl spot itself? It seems to be as much a guide for how to discover where to find the puzzles, as much as anything else.

Beyond the Super Bowl Spot: A Growing Tradition

Last year during the Super Bowl, GoDaddy partnered with Walton Goggins to use the SuperBowl to promote their AI site-building services. As part of the spot, Goggins walked over a crime scene before UV lights revealed he tracked footprints over a series of glyphs reminiscent of the Zodiac Killer’s script. Corners of the puzzle community attempted to tackle this prospective puzzle, but weren’t able to extract a message out of it. The verdict: it was probably just there for the aesthetic, although I did get sent a complementary pair of Walton Goggins Goggle Glasses as thanks for my failed efforts in attempting to crack the mystery.

While the GoDaddy puzzle didn’t appear to be real, puzzles have increasingly found their way into ad campaigns. Last year, ARGNet wrote about KFC’s advertisement that snuck 11 puzzles into their newest ad, with the first to crack each challenge awarded a year’s supply of fried chicken. The TV show Push, Nevada used a Monday Night Football placement to provide the last piece of a $1M scavenger hunt puzzle as far back as 2002. Puzzle challenges have even made their way into the Big Game before. Most recently in 2024, DoorDash offered one lucky winner every product or service advertised during the Super Bowl…as long as they could enter the commercial’s excessively long promo code without making a single mistake.

Quite a few alternate reality games have used movie trailers as vector for game launches as well, starting with The Beast in 2001. During the trailer for Steven Spielberg’s Artificial Intelligence, highlighted letters spelled out “WARN HER / JEANINE SALLA / EVAN DIED SINNING”, drawing fans’ attention to the curious credit for the film’s resident Sentient Machine Therapist. Years later, Cloverfield teased the ARG for JJ Abrams’ new film without even revealing the name of the property, instead directing fans to a website themed around the release date: 1-18-08.com. Abrams would later use a Super Bowl spot to not just share a trailer for the Cloverfield Paradox, but also to announce the full movie was already available for streaming.

Advertising placement at the Super Bowl is not cheap – Ad Week reports that this year, the price of some 30 second placements may have exceeded $10M. So, it’s no surprise that brands are looking to extend the campaign footprint beyond the 30 second spot. And launching a flashy puzzle hunt with a $1M prize in partnership with YouTube’s biggest creator looks to be scratching that itch…especially since a few of these puzzles look like they’d benefit greatly from online collaboration.

Which is why it should only come as a slight surprise that this isn’t even the only $1M puzzle hunt launched in conjunction with a Super Bowl commerical this year. RedFin’s Great American Home Search is a scavenger hunt giving away a house “hidden in Rocket and Redfin’s commercial”, that can be identified by solving a series of six clues provided in the Redfin mobile app.

Interested in tackling the Million Dollar Puzzle? Head over to MrBeast.Salesforce.com to check out the challenges.

The post Start Slacking Off with MrBeast’s Million Dollar Puzzle Hunt first appeared on ARGNet: Alternate Reality Gaming Network.

The final episode of Stranger Things dropped on Netflix on December 31st, allowing fans of the series to say goodbye to one of the platform’s biggest hits before ringing in the new year. But that wasn’t the final transmission from the franchise: for the past six weeks, the UK company Global had been operating the in-universe radio station WSQK: The Squawk as a live broadcast, and the station had one final broadcast to get through before going dark due to “transmission problems”.

Stranger Things leaned in to the story’s 80s nostalgia to engage in an aggressive list of brand partnerships over the years, and many of those partnerships took a decidedly immersive turn. So while it’s worth exploring what six weeks of radio broadcasting looked like for Stranger Things fans, this also marks an opportunity to reflect at the show’s immersive history.

WSQK The Squawk: Radio Hawkins with “Global” Reach

Partners in workplace crime Steve Harrington and Robin Buckley worked at quite a few jobs over the course of Stranger Things: they became friends at the mall ice cream shop Scoops Ahoy for season 3 before switching over to Family Video to enter the video rental business in season 4. The premiere of season 5 saw the pair taking over programming at Hawkins’ local radio station WSQK, completing the nostalgic career trifecta.

Leaning in on that nostalgia, the UK broadcaster Global partnered with Netflix to produce six weeks of content broadcast to coincide with the show’s release. Every few hours a radio bumper does remind listeners that WSQK was presented by Stranger Things, but for the most part the programming is presented as authentically as possible.

In an interview about the project, Global stressed to Rolling Stone how seriously they took getting the sound right, noting:

“Most music and sound-design elements came from genuine pre-Nineties libraries like Bruton; anything newly created was shaped to avoid anachronism. ReelWorld dissected classic American jingle packages and rebuilt them to sound as though they’d aired on a Midwestern station for decades. Modern analog-emulating plugins were used sparingly and intentionally, then remastered through a final signal chain before broadcast.

For true period accuracy, the on-air signal passes through a vintage Inovonics FM250 processor — the same model found in thousands of U.S. stations in the mid-Eighties.”

And while the focus of the broadcasts are solidly fixed on playing classic tunes, a number of interactive segments help the show come alive like Mindy Flare’s “Rewind at 9” segment that tested listeners with song identification challenges. “Talk With Tammy” invited listeners to ask for advice, while “Dial A Dedication” allowed listeners to send in messages to the show’s request line.

A Light Narrative, From an Alternate Version of Hawkins

There’s even a loose narrative that ties together the broadcasts of on air disc jockeys Vance Goodman and Mindy Flare, leading to the station’s eventual shuttering. In the lead-up to New Year’s Eve, news segments start mentioning the radio tower’s signal has started to cut out, providing updates on the station engineers’ efforts to fix it. On January 1st, realizing the station would be going offline for good, the pair offer a heartfelt farewell that manages to namecheck a frightening number of 80s hits.

Because of those engineering troubles the station is canonically offline now, but a fan archived the broadcasts, allowing for segment-by-segment replays on their website.

While the WSQK broadcasts were riddled with references to the town of Hawkins and the events of the series, they don’t appear to be canonical – at least, not unless you believe the “Conformity Gate” theories that ascribe secondary meaning to the details in season 5 that seem oddly out of place.

For instance, season 5 opens with Robin celebrating her 500th broadcast with WSQK, holding down the fort after the station’s former shock jock, Jimmy “Fast Hands” Lee, abandoned the station. Within Global’s iteration of Hawkins, Robin understandably doesn’t make an appearance…but neither does Jimmy. Instead, the main DJ’s names are nods to the series’ primary antagonists: “Mindy Flare” anagrams to Mind Flayer, while “Vance” anagrams to Vecna.

Man in the High Castle also experimented with spinning up an in-universe radio broadcast for fans of the series, back in 2017. Like WSQK, Resistance Radio created programming around three in-universe radio hosts. The centerpiece of Resistance Radio were a series of 18 original covers that imagined American classics if they were written for the resistance during a Nazi occupation.

Phone Numbers That Still Work, 40 Years Later

A more direct integration with Stranger Things can be found in the many phone numbers that appeared on the show over the years: for the most part, dialing the numbers shown on screen would be acknowledged in some fashion.

Find yourself missing Argyle? Dialing up the number for Surfer Boy Pizza would treat you to a borderline hilarious message of the man himself sharing the hyper-specific order he just received, along with a handful of other messages that were swapped out over time. Caught a phone number on a Missing Persons poster in the final season? You can call in to help find “Jane Hopper”. These relatively light touches are typically as deep as the show goes with direct integrations within episodes, although the tactic has been used to dive deeper, for other shows.

Most recently, Pluribus recently had some fun with an in-universe phone number, using a brief on-screen appearance to kick off a text adventure puzzle hunt to close out the first season. One of its more outlandish puzzles challenged solvers with decrypting RNA codon sequences hidden in the spectrogram of an audio file.

Stranger Things does have a host of spinoff books and comics extending the story, but the series was often at its immersive best when it opened the property up for other brands to play.

Stranger Things ARGs: From Ice Cream Parlors to Lite Brite Boards

During Stranger Things season 3, Netflix handed over creative reins of their show to Baskin-Robbins and Mssng P eces, which transformed two locations into Scoops Ahoy shops, as well as hiding cryptic signage at their store locations across the United States. But that was only scratching the surface.

Players realized that a morse code message hidden on the specialty ice cream flavor USS Butterscotch helped gain access to an SSH server inviting sleuths to join Operation Scoop Snoop. Once registered, fans were tasked with daily missions in preparation for gaining remote access to Cold War bunkers…only to realize their handler was a Russian spy all along. The ARG concluded with one final mission to help stop the Russians, and prevent a Demo-dog from escaping into the real world. Evocative ASCII art graphics complemented the final mission, which palyed out like a text adventure version of Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, cross-referencing operating manuals.

The final challenge of the ARG proved to be the hardest, but also the most rewarding: send a fax to a phone number, with the first player to finish winning a lifetime supply of Baskin-Robbins ice cream, and the promise of a set visit. This was by far the most expansive ARG for the show, and remains one of my favorite alternate reality games to this day.

Season 4’s ARG was handed over to the NFT collectible company Candy, but still managed to construct an impressive game: during the season’s official trailer, a brightly colored rift flashed on the screen, with timestamps next to the six breaches in reality. Overlaying the rift over the timestamps in the video revealed a message, and website: I Am Hell’s Master.

This became the hub for a puzzle game that resulted in entering “passwords” by following instructions to make intricate art on a virtual Lite Brite game board…including one pizza-themed puzzle that actually made use of the mixed-up order Surfer Boy Pizza’s curious voicemail message, mentioned earlier in this article.

I Am Hell’s Master didn’t go out of its way to tell a narrative, but the creative ways the game hid Lite Brite coordinates made constructing the visually arresting pieces of nostalgic art even more satisfying, for season 4’s puzzle trail.

Beyond Broadway: From Screen to Immersive Stage

Even before Netflix brought Stranger Things: The First Shadow to Broadway, the company partnered with Fever to send Stranger Things: The Experience on tour. For the experience, attendees were welcomed to Hawkins Labs as test subjects and realize that they have super powers that can be used to advance through the experience. Unfortunately the labs become overrun with Demo-dogs, slaughtering researchers until the Stranger Things crew arrives to save the day. The final showdown with Vecna was particularly impressive, as a live actress playing Eleven is somewhat seamlessly replaced by a video counterpart to work the show’s final magic.

You can get a sense of the experience from this fan recording, but the real treat was the Mix-Tape experience at the end, which recreated a version of the Starcourt Mall with roving actors looking to engage in some light Larping, as well as offering assistance in a secret scavenger hunt, to find a series of rifts hidden in the set design.

The newly launched Netflix House features yet another immersive theater production, in the form of Stranger Things: Escape the Dark.

Picking Up on Clues: Introduction to Conformity Gate

Reception to the Stranger Things finale has been mixed, with segments of the fanbase frustrated at how some of the narrative threads resolved. But one corner of the fandom has come up with a creative theory that implies that was by design known as “Confirmity Gate”.

According to Conformity Gate, the final episode in particular features a lot of details that don’t make sense, both narratively and from a continuity perspective. One of the more curious continuity swaps involved an Instagram Story post from actor Finn Wolfhard, showing the characters’ D&D binders, rearranged from their appearance in the series to spell out “A LIE”. One of the main branches of the theory claims that this ending is a pleasant fiction, planted by the Mind Flayer to lull the series protagonists into a false sense of security.

Some leave the theory at that, while others are hunting for clues that imply there might be a secret final episode to the series that serves as the “true” end. And while the existence of a secret ending is unlikely, Stranger Things‘ engagement with fans for the past five seasons doesn’t rule that out as impossible. Hundreds of ice cream parlors were decorated with morse code messages and a Russian code wheel that helped unlock secret messages. A throwaway voicemail number was reused to deliver a Lite Brite passcode. The show’s licensed merchandise even included branded flashlights with secret UV messages on the packaging.

If anything, the factor leaving me skeptical regarding grand plans for a secret episode is how much of Stranger Things‘ immersive surprises relied on brand partnerships to fuel them. Operation Scoop Snoop was a Baskin Robbins partnership. Stranger Things: The Experience gave Fever a major brand to help expand its live event footprint. And even WSQK drew upon Europe’s largest commercial radio broadcaster to make it happen.

Indeed, one of Stranger Things‘ legacies might well be how open the brand was to letting other companies play within their playground in hundreds of different ways.

To listen to Global’s WSQK archives, check out LivingHuman.Host/WSQK
For Baskin-Robbins’ ARG, read ARGNet’s coverage of Operation Scoop Snoop
For Candy’s ARG / puzzle trail, read ARGNet’s Coverage of I Am Hell’s Master
For a video of Stranger Things: The Experience, check out this YouTube video
…and for more on Conformity Gate, search for the hashtag on your fan platform of choice.

UPDATED TO ADD: Secret Cinema also created a large-scale immersive theater production reenacting season 3 of the show in London, as covered in No Proscenium.

The post The Immersive Side of Hawkins: From Scoops Ahoy to WSQK Radio first appeared on ARGNet: Alternate Reality Gaming Network.

“Whatever you do, at the crossroads, don’t turn left. Don’t be fooled. It’s listening.” This is the strange message that a Minecrafter named AVeryLargeMayo (“Avery”) discovered inside a book in his Minecraft instance. At the end of the book, there’s a cryptic cipher that Avery doesn’t know how to solve. So, he makes a video asking the internet to help solve the mystery for him. All told, the video is less than four minutes long. Which makes the 40 minute long video the YouTuber the Minecraft YouTuber Wifies makes unpacking his discoveries exploring the Searching For a World That Doesn’t Exist ARG all the more impressive…even if he is secretly the game’s creator. And it’s that clever incorporation of the “ARG Explainer” video format as part of the ARG’s content that makes this Minecraft ARG so fascinating.

At least on the surface, this alternate reality game is handed to viewers as a fully-solved and crisply edited package, explaining (almost) everything and leaving little to the imagination. And yet, there is still considerable value in going to the “source material”, as none of the game’s three narrators are fully reliable.

Unlocking the First Layer: An Introduction to D3rlord3
The puzzle that Avery presents as the initial call to action in his video remains unsolved, at least at the beginning of the video: it doesn’t quite work as alphanumeric cipher, and similar attempts to treat it like a book cipher are quickly thwarted. Instead, Wifies falls down the rabbit hole by examining an inventory menu that flashes briefly onscreen during Avery’s video…a glitch in the system.

Wifies discovers that taking the first letter of each inventory item (and capitalizing the letters if there’s more than one of the item in the stack) spells out the location of a Google Drive link. So, the first image of a light block would be the number “1”, the three zombie heads in the second slot would become a capital “Z”, and the vine in the third slot would become the letter “v”.

When Wifies checks the URL, he finds the Google Drive link contains three files: two of these files are ~100 minutes of “raw” footage of someone playing Minecraft, and the final file is a PDF of an info doc from an anonymous Minecraft player, noting that the videos represent their “exploration into a strange tunnel I found in my minecraft world.” The rest of the video is Wifies’ account of what he uncovers through those video files from a user we’d later learn goes by the username D3rlord3.

Notably, this is only a puzzle that works when explained in retrospect: the numbers could have just as easily represented indices into the words, and interpreting the blank space as underscore presumes that the solution will be a Google Drive link. But since this is a puzzle constructed to be presented as solved, none of that matters. The link wouldn’t even need to exist, since Wifies helpfully explains everything you’d need to know about its contents.

And yet, the Google Drive link does exist. You can watch the full 100 minutes of D3rlord3’s exploration. AveryLargeMayo’s channel also exists, so you can confirm the secret message is present, and watch him win at a game of SkyWars.

The Protagonist’s Competence: What Would D3rlord3 Do
As the PDF introduction explains, D3rlord3’s videos center around his exploration of curious signs of life that shouldn’t exist on a random Minecraft seed. At first, the idiosyncrasies are little things: plant life growing where it shouldn’t. But then, he notices signs of something following him. Footsteps echoing just a half-second too long after stopping…torches going out in a long tunnel when they shouldn’t.

D3rlord3 sets up layered traps using obscure Minecraft functionality about how chunks load to confirm that something is following him, and determine how much it can see and hear. He confirms: something is out there, and it appears to be “listening” to what he says in chat, as well. Moving forward, he is writing to this unseen follower as much as anything else.

Eventually, he stumbles across a block of cipher text carved into the walls. In the raw footage, he pauses here for over 15 minutes, commenting “this isn’t trivial” before solving the puzzle and complimenting his unseen follower: “got it. good poem…but cipher stacking is pretty bad practice you know”.

Wifies doesn’t solve this cipher himself in his video overview, but he does provide a transcription of the letters…or at least, a reasonable facsimile of a transcription, since it’s incredibly easy to confuse similar letters in the block text etched into the walls of his Minecraft world. When corrected, something like this emerges:

Using the corrected cipher text and the Vigenere key CIPPSA (the word “yellow” shifted four letters forward) gives something close to the following poem:

Beneath the sky of melting gold
Ancient echoes of a shepherds mold
An old decay If left one goes
Is unseen truth all but faux

This is one of the most fascinating narrative beats of the ARG. As the game’s creator, Wifies knows both the intended solution, and the transcription necessary to generate it. As the creator of the explainer video, however, he does not know the answer and is equally baffled by how to transcribe the cipher text, since much of the resolution of ambiguous letters shown above required familiarity with the structure of the intended message.

Even then, a likely error in what was carved into virtual walls leaves part of the message inscrutable. And yet all of this is solved by D3rlord3 in mere minutes, followed by a snarky comment on poor puzzle design.

The first segment of Searching For a World That Doesn’t Exist is a celebration of D3rlord3’s competence: both through his knowledge of the game, and his ability to solve complex puzzles with minimal effort invested. And this is something that Wifies celebrates in his narration. All to make the fall that much more poignant.

The Hubris and Downfall of D3rlord3
After moving on from the puzzle, D3rlord3 enters an abandoned village and finds a book that recounts the King in Yellow’s initial visit to the world. The book’s anonymous author leaves a final entreaty:

I’m going. I’m leaving this here in the rare case someone finds it. If you have found this, I implore you, turn back. Disconnect. Forget about this world. It is not for you.

If you’ve come here you must be curious. I know you must want to continue onwards.

So I know that this is a heavy ask, but please do not go any further. For you own good. Do not.

D3rlord3 ignores this message, and finds a staircase hidden behind a bookshelf that leads to a pair of massive golden doors. What he sees is censored from view, even with the “raw” footage from the Google Drive link. Whatever it is he sees, it causes him to hurry back to the initial room, and write the warning for whoever is unlucky enough to find the world next.

Only this time, with the footage of his gameplay, we have the key to translate the cipher: yet again, it relies on the contents of his inventory, with the book cipher indexing into the names of items in set inventory slots. The message: RUN AVERY ITS HERE.

We don’t hear again from Avery, so his fate remains a mystery.

A Quick Refresher to The King in Yellow
At its core, Searching For A World That Doesn’t Exist is an allusion to the mythos that emerged around Robert W Chambers’ short story collection, The King in Yellow. Chambers introduced The King in Yellow through a series of four connected short stories in a book of the same name, centered around a play capable of driving its readers mad. Each short story touches on a different person’s experiences with the play, and the different flavors of madness it could trigger.

And while the play itself is never fully revealed, excerpts provide glimpses into what can be found within, through lyric poetry. Some of that poetry references Carcosa, the ruins of an “ancient and famous city” introduced through Ambrose Bierce’s An Inhabitant of Carcosa. The search for Carcosa itself drove one of its former inhabitants mad, culminating in the man discovering his own tombstone.

While The King in Yellow has come to be associated with the Lovecraftian mythos’ Hastur, the King himself is rarely the direct threat: instead, it’s the stories that touch upon him.

Do Not Trust This Video: The Existential Threat of Curiosity
D3rlord3 received an explicit warning against curiosity from a book left by a nameless villager. He ignored the message, until he was confronted by whatever lay behind the door. As what seems like his final act, he passed on the same message to the next person to find themselves in this world: “whatever you do, at the crossroads, don’t turn left.”

Suspecting this wouldn’t be enough to slake his successor’s curiosity, he left a video archive of his journey. In it, he revealed that something was following him…watching him. Through tests, he realized that it wasn’t just following him: it could see what he was writing. What he was doing. And so, he left a second, more deeply obscured message to the Minecraft instance’s next recipient: “Run Avery, it’s here.” This message wasn’t set to be triggered after Avery himself passed through the golden doors: instead, it was set to be triggered by finishing the story. Because what if the threat wasn’t just turning left at the crossroads and confronting what lay behind the golden doors yourself, but merely witnessing the act?

If so, that begs the question: who shared that Google Drive link, in the first place? Was that actually an example of D3rlord3 warning future visitors of what was to come, or was it the unknown entity tricking more people into engaging with the story? Were all the ciphers, codes, and secret online folders an excuse to expose more people to the story? And did pulling on all those threads place Wifies (and by extension the ARG’s active playerbase) in greater danger?

An ARG That Weaponizes the “Explainer Video” Dynamic
Searching For A World That Doesn’t Exist works incredibly well as standalone explainer video. The raw footage was re-cut to create dramatic tension, audio narration explains the mostly silent main character’s strategic choices, and an epic soundtrack provides full orchestral accompaniment to the story. There’s really no need to dig any deeper, especially since the reveals that can be uncovered are relatively minor. By contrast, the “raw footage” can be an often confusing slog, and understanding the puzzles feels borderline impenetrable.

And that influences audiences’ reactions to the work: near the end of Wifies’ video, he ponders, “whatever was [censored behind the golden doors] in that black square was enough to drive probably the smartest protagonist I’ve ever seen into running for his life.” When Ludwig Ahgren does a live reaction to the episode on stream, he echoes that sentiment: “what is this, Light Yagami…the smartest motherf*cker to ever exist”. Not because of what D3rlord3 did…but because of Wifies’ explanation of that behavior.

But Wifies’ video is edited to tell a particular narrative, and that viewpoint is limited: both by knowledge, and by editorial intent. Since D3rlord3 doesn’t explain the solution to the cipher carved into the cave wall, Wifies doesn’t understand it enough to properly transcribe the message, making the message harder to untangle based on his record. But in the edit, he also leans into making D3rlord3 as “the smartest protagonist I’ve ever seen”, leaving moments that go against that narrative out of the final cut. A TikToker went through and created their own edit of some of his more humanizing moments…and while this edit is itself a curated view, it finds a different story in the same source material. Another TikToker even highlighted a moment where D3rlord3 almost walks away from the mystery after reading about the King in Yellow’s initial visit to the Minecraft instance.

D3rlord3’s unreliable narration came from conflicting motivations: the playthrough was presumably left as a record for Avery…but because of his wholly justified paranoia about an unseen entity literally following his every step, at least some of what he shared was left as a trap for that entity. He’s perfectly willing to leave a plaintext warning against following his footsteps. But the warning that the danger exists even without experiencing it himself is obfuscated.

Finally, there’s Avery himself – almost an afterthought to the whole story, existing to pass the mystery on from one storyteller to another. We see no evidence of him solving any mysteries, or even exploring the space. And yet, his video includes a hidden message that is essential in passing the story on to yet another victim. Did his lack of inquisitiveness save him and he’s back to happily trouncing friends at SkyWars, or did he merely fail to document his downfall?

If this is a story drawing on the King in Yellow mythos, it doesn’t take seeing the King to drive one mad. It’s being confronted with stories of him. D3rlord3’s presumed descent into madness didn’t start at the golden doors, it was already upon him when he translated the poem carved into the cave walls. It continued when he read a story about the King’s visit. And yes, it came to a head when he saw what was behind the golden doors.

These days, maybe all it takes to spread a memetic virus is a fresh coat of yellow paint on a Minecraft ARG explainer video…give it a watch on Wifies’ YouTube channel, just in case. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Updated 3/30 to add: Wifies has released a two hour long follow-up to the original video titled Destroying A World That Doesn’t Exist, offering a summary of the considerably longer AveryTheMayo video behind the gates, clocking in at a vaguely terrifying fifteen hours.

This update was preceded by a more formal alternate reality game Wifies launched as part of Minecraft Live – players compiled a Google Doc walkthrough of the solve, and the YouTuber Freshi created his own video walkthrough, including a video interview with Wifies about the experience.

The post The King in Yellow as Found Footage Minecraft ARG first appeared on ARGNet: Alternate Reality Gaming Network.

It’s Saturday evening. A team of six puzzlers have spent the past five hours traveling across New York City for a hunt, and just decoded a sequence of responses from a custom Ouija board: the answers to the thirteen questions they had just asked spelled out GPS coordinates to a nearby office complex. Upon arriving at their destination, they rush past the Alamo Drafthouse to reach their next destination: a non-profit filled with vibrantly decorated pianos, arranged in rings of four. Multicolored stickers adorn several keys on each piano, practically begging to be played. And identifying the songs they’re about to perform is only the first step.

This experiential snapshot was from the charity puzzle event Midnight Madness. Famed composer and playwright Stephen Sondheim was not directly involved in the creation of this hunt, and none of his songs were featured in the puzzle that unfurled as teams tickled the ivory. And yet, as Barry Joseph argues in his new book Matching Minds with Sondheim, that event (and many more like it) might never have happened had it not been for Sondheim’s passion for puzzling.

Joseph makes an incredibly compelling case, tracing Sondheim’s influence through everything from puzzle hunts and cryptic crosswords to escape rooms and even board games. The book highlights how the puzzles and games that Sondheim created as intimate gifts for friends, family, and colleagues shaped the modern puzzling landscape.

In Good Company: Sondheim’s Surprising Puzzling Cameos

Much of the thrill of Matching Minds with Sondheim comes from learning how deeply embedded Sondheim was across early puzzling communities. Fans of Sondheim’s musicals might be surprised to learn that he moonlit as New York magazine’s first puzzle editor, starting with the magazine’s launch in 1968. During that tenure, he helped popularize the cryptic crossword format to American audiences, simplifying elements to be more approachable. And while Broadway fans may have been familiar with his longtime friendship with fellow composer Leonard Bernstein, the fact that he created a series of three narratively linked board games known as The Great Conductor Hunt to celebrate the man’s 50th birthday is less publicized.

Even Sondheim’s Broadway casts were enlisted into his puzzling fun. For decades up until his death in 2021, cast members would receive puzzles as elaborate opening night gifts…from custom engraved beans bearing a message of thanks for Into the Woods, to jigsaw puzzles with the recipient’s initials etched into the pattern.

Whether your puzzling passion leads you into the realm of video games (he was an avid fan of games like Myst), puzzle boxes (he had an extensive collection) or game shows (Sondheim spent years trying to hunt down a clip from his highly successful appearance on the game show Password), Matching Minds showcases Sondheim’s deep and abiding love for play.

Each of these forays into puzzles and games showcases a man infatuated with the many ways puzzles and games can spark creativity and inspire passion. In terms of puzzling tomes, I turn to AJ Jacobs’ The Puzzler as a tour of passionate puzzling communities. But Matching Minds with Sondheim may be my new reference book for showcasing why someone might fall in love with puzzles in the first place. And that celebration shines brightest (especially for ARGNet readers) in Barry Joseph’s section on treasure hunts, and The Murder Game.

Into the Puzzling Woods: From The Murder Game to Last of Sheila

Stephen Sondheim was obsessed with parlor games, and created a whole series of games that he would challenge his friends and family to tackle. He became particularly enamored with murder mystery parties, and created his own version to fix what he saw as some of the flaws of the format: so, he created The Murder Game in 1965, which constructed a murder mystery game with a puzzling twist that meant you could only play it once.

To begin the evening, players are handed numbered envelopes with instructions to retrieve a clue, hidden somewhere within the house. If the murderer catches you while trying to retrieve the evidence, they can either destroy the evidence or take it as their own before the survivors reconvene to sort out who the real killer is, based on the evidence left behind. I won’t spoil the trick here, in part because Matching Minds with Sondheim includes a version of the Murder Game that you can try and solve along as you read. But it’s a delightfully clever mechanic that provides even the killer’s silenced victims a chance to figure out what secret their evidence pack contained.

Sondheim went on to create increasingly elaborate hunts for friends and family. the Halloween Treasure Hunt was his first foray into puzzle hunts in 1968, sending teams of puzzlers throughout Manhattan in limousines. Sondheim’s ambitions only grew, with later hunts. The events were often created as gifts to close friends and family, and might include taking over the Shubert theater for a puzzle hunt that could only be solved by the cast and crew of A Little Night Music, or asking players to exchange cross-continental faxes with Stephen Fry. For one of his rare public hunts, Sondheim even teamed up with Hollywood power couple Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick to take over the American Museum of Natural History for a charity event priced at $1,500 a head.

Inspired by his experiences playing The Murder Game and some of Sondheim’s earlier puzzle hunts, director Herbie Ross turned many of the games and puzzles Sondheim used to torture his friends into the 1973 film The Last of Sheila. Sondheim himself collaborated on the movie’s screenplay, delighting in baking puzzles into everything from the film to its promotional materials. After viewing the film, puzzlers Donald Luskin and Patrick Carlyle were so inspired that they created their own puzzle hunt on the West Coast called The Game. This in turn inspired the movie Midnight Madness in 1980, which went on to inspire the puzzle hunt of the same name that started off this article. Sometimes, the nods get explicit. As Barry Joseph notes, homages to The Last of Sheila are so prevalent in the Benoit Blanc mystery Glass Onion that giving Sondheim his own cameo as one of Blanc’s colleagues in Among Us…which itself is an evolution of Sondheim’s Murder Game.

These explorations of creative provenance are some of the most deeply researched parts of Matching Minds with Sondheim, and why I feel comfortable going into so much detail about this particular subsection of the book’s subject matter. The book celebrates Sondheim’s story through the recollections of people who actually participated in his games and puzzles, through bite-sized puzzle snippets you can solve as you read, and through winding paths that show how Sondheim’s impact in the spaces he loved echoes to this day. One particularly heartwarming anecdote mentions how Sondheim’s love of escape rooms took him to the Dante-themed production Paradiso, only to learn that one of the puzzles he designed in 1968 was incorporated into the modern escape room as obscure homage. At another point, Barry Joseph even stages a Zoom playthrough of one of the better documented hunts, enlisting friends from various corners of Sondheim’s puzzling life as participants.

Sunday in the Park with Barry: The Author As Puzzle Master

In case you haven’t guessed yet, Matching Minds with Sondheim is more than just a book. Many of the pictures scattered throughout this article were taken at the Drama Book Shop’s pop-up exhibit dedicated to Sondheim’s penchant for puzzles, which ran through the month of October. Joseph also launched a podcast, featuring extended interviews with many of the experts consulted for the book. The episodes on escape rooms and The Last of Sheila are likely of particular interest to ARGNet readers. And that’s not even getting into the book’s hidden puzzles.

The first secret puzzle in the book is fairly easy to find: the book’s dedication is a series of enumerated spaces, left as a cryptographic exercise for the reader. Pairing that enumeration with something that appears later in the book makes it possible (although still difficult) to work out Barry’s intended message. The next puzzle takes a little more attention to discover, but starts getting a little more personal.

While paging through the book’s index, you might be surprised to find a few out of place references, including a mention of Sentient Machine Therapist Dr. Jeanine Salla. No mention of Dr Salla appears on the referenced page, she’s just…there. This might make a bit more sense with some additional context about Barry Joseph himself, as he didn’t arrive at the subject of this book by happenstance.

In addition to being one of the co-founders of Games for Change, Joseph was also one of the initial ARG players known as “Cloudmakers”, who participated in The Beast, which is often credited as the first alternate reality game. And a stray reference to Dr Jeanine Salla in the promotional materials for the film Artificial Intelligence served as primary trailhead for The Beast. If the text of the book is a tour through Sondheim’s love of puzzles and games, this embedded puzzle trail is a tour of Barry Joseph’s own passions for the space.

Anyone Can Puzzle: Sondheim’s Other Legacy

ARGNet has covered a number of celebrities and their passion for puzzling in the past, from Neil Patrick Harris and Alex Hirsch to Taylor Swift. And while they have all left their marks, it’s hard to overstate how much of an impact Stephen Sondheim has left on the puzzling world. So, to close out this coverage of Matching Minds with Sondheim, I thought it would be fitting to highlight some of the hunts and experiences that might not have existed without Sondheim.

ARGNet has already covered Great Gotham Challenge, but Sondheim-inspired treasure hunts aren’t limited to New York City. Earlier this year, Different Area Same Hunt returned with a half day puzzle hunt that played out simultaneously in 25 different cities, leading teams of 3-5 through a series of locations to pick up fiendishly clever puzzles wrapped in a light narrative. This year’s hunt led participants on a safari through an animal sanctuary. A personal puzzling highlight was this year’s “Duck Konundrum” puzzle, a following-directions style puzzle that our team members play a game of trivia with each person doing something completely different.

As the resident #CrowFacts expert on our team, I was charged with ignoring all the actual trivia questions and spouting out dubiously accurate facts. Did you know that according to science, at some point each of us will die? Duck Konundrum puzzles are an exercise in trusting the process: the tasks you’re charged with doing may seem like nonsense, but if you follow every instruction to the letter, things have a way of working out and delivering an answer.

In a 2011 WIRED interview, DASH creator Deb Goldstein notes that it was created as a slightly more accessible offshoot of Bay Area Night Game (which in turn was a more accessible version of The Game). DASH also provides a free print-and-play archive of past hunts, making it one of the more accessible hunts for those interested in hosting their own Zoom Party playthroughs.

Midnight Madness NYC leans in more towards Sondheim’s charitable hunts as inspiration, asking teams to donate a hefty sum to charity as the cost of entrance. This year I volunteered as part of Game Control, doling out hints to teams as they raced across New York City until 3AM. This year’s hunt was Houdini themed, and teams were handed “magic wands” that helped make the city come alive. A particularly cinematic sequence led teams throughout a series of street corners in Alphabet City, with magical encounters along the way. Eventually, teams learn that the locations they were visiting mapped to a secret card order often used by magicians. Proceeding to the next locations in sequence (while reordering a deck of cards provided earlier) led to a major reveal.

Even the MIT Mystery Hunt owes a debt of gratitude to Sondheim. While credit for the puzzle hunt’s origin is a bit more circuitous than the previously mentioned outdoor hunts, Matching Minds with Sondheim notes that Mark Halpin would frequently send Sondheim “cryptics that were created for MIT or for various puzzle events”, so Mystery Hunt constructors can now wonder if one of their own puzzles ever graced Sondheim’s desk.

What’s particularly heartening about Matching Minds with Sondheim is that it shows off how a creative legacy can be about deeply impacting a small circle of like-minded colleagues who share a passion for the art, as much as anything else. The Murder Game was a parlor game designed for a handful of people and yet it helped inspire an entire subculture.

A number of friends in the puzzle community have recently started celebrating birthdays by asking friends to create bespoke games and activities for the celebration. During these events I’ve taught a course on lockpicking despite not being able to pick locks. I’ve mailed 3D printed Moo Dengs to out-of-state friends so that they could surprise the birthday girl at conferences by dramatically handing over tiny pygmy hippos. And I recorded a video triggered by a NFC tagged necklace.

And as much as Matching Minds with Sondheim makes me contemplate how major projects like the Gravity Falls ARGs inspired an expansive fan project, it also brings to mind the impact of those more intimate creative explorations that are intended as a gift to a loved one, or celebration for a small group of friends.

For more on the Matching Minds with Sondheim book and podcast, visit MatchingMindsWithSondheim.com. It doesn’t just provide a rich and evocative history of a man who deeply loved puzzles…it celebrates how that love can take root in others, and blossom into something bigger. Reading the book even inspired me to overcome my long-standing aversion to cryptics. That’s right, I finally started teaching myself the format (with a little help from the Minute Cryptic daily puzzles).

The post Stephen Sondheim Loved Puzzles More Than You first appeared on ARGNet: Alternate Reality Gaming Network.

Last year, ARGNet reviewed the first installment in PostCurious’ episodic puzzle series, The Ministry of Lost Things: Lint Condition. The series of puzzle games center around the “Elusiverse”, a world filled with the lost and forgotten objects from our world enter when they’re misplaced. The crowdfunding campaign ultimately invited over 4,000 backers to join the Department of Returns as scouts, looking to return lost objects of sentimental value to their humans.

PostCurious is back crowdfunding for its second installment of the series, Ministry of Lost Things: Finders Keepers. The newest release is just as whimsical and lighthearted as the last, and packed full with so much wordplay, you could almost be excused for thinking the game’s dozen or so puzzles were just an excuse to inflict a series of tortured puns on players.

A Surprisingly Heartfelt Story for a Relatively Tiny Box
With the first installment of Ministry of Lost Things, finding out what object went missing was an element of the first puzzle. For Finders Keypers, things start out with a more explicit task: Cary the Carabiner ended up detached from her owner Jenna’s bag, and all of the keys she was securing became scattered. As a scout for the Department of Returns, it’s your job to traverse the Elusiverse collecting witness statements and solving puzzles to find the lost objects, learning along the way why they’re more than just keys to Jenna.

And every square inch of that heartfelt story is packed with more puns than you’re prepared to handle. One of the game’s early puzzles does a particularly good job of exemplifying this: starting off in The Keys (a location initially teased in the game’s first installment), Department of Returns scouts are tasked with tracing down the carabiner’s path through a series of islands that weaves through “Rock” and “Hard Place”, past “Key Largo” and its nearby counterpart “Key Smaller”, and past a series of islets like “Doss Isle, Grocery Isle, and Rept Isle”.

If your reaction to that map is more of a chortle than a wince, this is the game for you since that’s the type of whimsy that saturates every part of the game, whether it contributes to the puzzle solving or not. There may be a dozen puzzles to this game, but there’s easily over a hundred literary flourishes, making this just as much a pun-laden successor to Piers Anthony’s Xanth novels as it is a puzzle game.

Streamlined Structure Made with Logic Puzzle Lovers in Mind
Ministry of Lost Things: Finders Keypers is structured around five “Transmissions” centered around for the hunt for the missing keys at the center of this mystery. Each transmission will include 2-3 separate puzzles with one challenge focused around locating the missing key, and another about uncovering why it was so significant to Jenna. And priced at $26 for the game, the Ministry of Lost Things games remain PostCurious’ most affordable product offering.

Logic puzzles are frequently a highlight in PostCurious games, but Ministry of Lost Things leans in particularly heavily on the format in order to fit an entire multi-part adventure into a box the size of a tarot deck. That is not to say the puzzles are repetitive. While logic puzzles do account for almost half of the game’s puzzles, each one feels fresh and distinct, introducing unique rules and mechanics. The puzzles just happen to lean heavily on types designed to satisfy fans of Murdle who wished the game had a little more variety or a stronger tactile element to the solving process.

By way of example: one of the more delightful logic puzzles in Finders Keypers involves figuring out the physical traits of a certain object using descriptions from witness testimony. However, that standard logic puzzle structure is complicated by a fun and thematic twist: none of the witnesses are reliable, with each one getting a single detail wrong.

To be clear, this is not a pen-and-paper puzzle box: practically every puzzle (whether it’s a logic puzzle or not) involves moving around game pieces in creative and frequently unexpected ways, and the game’s final puzzle delivers a particularly satisfying reveal that resonates at both puzzle and narrative levels.

The Kickstarter campaign has already funded, and will be running through the morning of October 30th. And as is PostCurious tradition, the campaign is also releasing a series of four weekly puzzles so PostCurious-curious backers can get a sense of what their puzzles are like. This time, four people who successfully solved all the puzzles will win a preview copy of the game, to join the Department of Returns even earlier.

So check out The Ministry of Lost Things on Kickstarter soon, for both puzzle puns and preview prizes. The game is a standalone game so you don’t need to play Lint Conditions first, but there’s also an option to buy both games through the campaign.

Note: ARGNet received a review copy of Ministry of Lost Things.

The post Ministry of Lost Things Delivers a Box of Puns with a Side of Puzzles first appeared on ARGNet: Alternate Reality Gaming Network.