Teams were told to gather at the Brau Haus, a bar in the
bottom level of Spencer’s Corner downtown. This broke the
tradition of starting in Hill Wheatley Plaza, but was still a cool
place to begin the game. Teams had a chance to talk and
hang out, eat and drink before the game began. When it
finally did, we saw GC and a giant monkey come down in
the elevator. It was pretty cool looking. Then we followed
the monkey out into the parking lot, where he dumped the
clues out into the crowd and we broke out.
What we got from the Monkey was a CD case with several
CDs and graph paper with lines on it, and a sheet with our
clue. The CDs and graph paper were supposed to be used
later on in the game, but we worked on it as the night went
on. The CDs had like 200 TV theme songs on them, and
we figured you wrote the titles on the graph paper between
the lines. This would come into play later on.
The first clue on first glance looked like it was in binary, but
Josh realized that it wasn’t binary. We couldn’t figure out
how to crack it without a hint though. What we did figure out
on our own was that we were supposed to disregard lines
that started with 0. What we couldn’t figure out without a
hint was that the clue was actually in braille. Decoded it
said “Marconi plays the mamba, hhgfm.”
We googled “marconi plays the mamba” and found it to be a
lyric to “We built this city” by Jefferson Starship. The next
line in that song was “listen to the radio.” Then we figured
that hhg could map to 88.7 fm. We turned on that station,
and voila, we were listening to Jefferson Starship.
After the song, we were greeted by the voice of Revrend
Jim Pansy. He rambled on for a long time about how the
country is in trouble and we all need to choose a righteous
path from the good book. It sounded at first like he was
giving us physical directions to a clue. He kept saying “Go
left, and there is misery and death, but go right, and you
have a unified system.” He then plays the heavy metal
song “widowmaker.” Somehow we convinced ourselves
after thinking too long about “widowmaker” that we needed
to find a funeral home on our left and a United Methodist
Church on our right, which we actually found!!! But when we
couldn’t find a clue GC told us we were going about it all
wrong.
Hilariously, we drove back to the Brau Haus to listen to the
broacast some more, and as we sat there listening, we kept
seeing teams pull up, run in, and run out. For some
reason, probably because it was the site of the beginning of
the game, we never thought they may be going in to get
THIS clue.
Eventually, after GC told us to listen to what he INITIALLY
syas, we realized he was repeating the phrase “But Right
And yoU Have A Unified System.” At this point we were
probably in fifth or sixth place.
Inside the Brau Haus we were directed to the end of the bar
where a man was sitting drinking “Widowmaker” beer. He
asked us a series of silly questions that we figured at the
time would mean something later in the game, so we wrote
them all down, but they never came up again in the game.
He also gave us an empty bottle of Widowmaker Ale.
The bottle’s label had the story of the beer on it. We
recognized a street name and paired it with the year on the
bottle and googled it to find that the address was for the
Movie Gallery video store on Albert Pike.
As we are headed there, TC asks incredulously, “how can
you guys be sure? What if its just a coincidence that this
beer has a street name on its label?” We pointed out to TC
that Game Control MADE that beer label themselves, a
point that hadn’t occurred to him yet. Welcome to Midnight
Madness, TC.
At the Movie Gallery, there were several teams already
there. When we went inside, the staff there asked us for
our bottles, then peeled back the label to reveal a barcode
that they scanned. Then they gave us a movie. The box
was even redone from the Movie Gallery logo to say
“Monkey Gallery.”
Inside the box was a CD and a receipt with an address on
it. We headed to that address. The CD wouldn’t play in our
CD player, so we had just started messing with it on the
computer when we got to the address.
The address was at a strip where we had a clue last year,
Redbeard’s tattoo shop. Every team seemed to
immediately go there. I’m sure Redbeard was a little
freaked to see us all again. But the clue wasn’t there, it was
in a car parked across the street in a parking lot.
We were supposed to play the strange CD in their special
CD player, and listen in on headphones. There was only
one team in line in front of us, so we figured ourselves for
second place at this point.
The CD had a bunch of stuff on it about Dual Tone Multi-
Frequency, also known as touchtone. Then it told us a
track number and group number where we could find out
more.
We used the computer to locate the track, then isolated the
group of tones. We figured our job was to play the tones
into a phone and it would call a number. We were semi-
prepared for the clue in that we had .wav files of all the
phone tones, but they weren’t necessary.
After trying a couple of payphones, and freaking out
civilians (three guys in labcoats standing around a
payphone with a laptop hooked up to it and headphones)
we gave up and drove to Josh’s house to try on a landline.
When we got there, we figured we were beat because
another team appeared to be there, but it turned out they
were a clue behind us.
The phone rang up a recording telling us to go to a
particluar address and look for “Mr. Biggles.”
We found Mr. Biggles in a parking lot on Grand Ave. He
gave us an envelope and told us that the enemy should not
see us together. (Note to GC: it would have been much
cooler and pretty easy to put Biggles in costume here.) The
envelope contained a bowling scorecard, a pigpen cipher,
and a dossier on our contact at the next location. The
dossier also had a code on it, but after trying some Caesar
shifts on it, we tabled it figuring we’d need to get to the next
location to solve it.
Josh tackled the bowling score, being an avid bowler (btw
we knew we’d have a bowling score clue from the training
video in the pregame) and I tackled the pigpen cipher, I
guess being an avid pigpen myself.
We had an address in under ten minutes and zero hints. If
we weren’t already in first place, I’m sure we were now.
The address took us to a storage building behind a house.
We had instructions that when we got there, that we were to
pose as “Abe Scheizer” and that we could NOT blow our
cover. The envelope had also provided us a “disguise”,
which was a fake moustache. We sat in the van for a while
and had josh practice reciting his information. Then we
approached the house. Two german guys took us to the
room and told us we had ten minutes to finish the clue, and
that everything we needed was in the room.
In the room was a big Nazi flag, a table with 3 typewriters
with the keys in different places, a sheet with a letter from
headquarters, and a sheet with phone numbers next to
german words. We still had our dossier. Before even
reading any of the instructions, Josh figured he needed to
type the code from the dossier in one typewriter, then type
what he got in the next one, and so on until he had a
plaintext message.
As he did it, we read the letter, which told us to call central
hq immediately for help. We looked it up in our german-
english dictionary, then found it on the phone list and
called. HQ told us the order of typewriters to use. We did it
in the correct order and got “EZ Mart” and took off.
For those of you who didn’t get the Nazi reference with that
clue, the typewriters served as a rudimentary “enigma”
machine, which was a code machine developed in WW2
and believed by the Nazi’s to be totally unbreakable. The
Allies broke it, however, and were able to read Nazi
communications through much of the war.
On the way to EZ Mart, I told everyone I was familiar with
this particular gas station because, in my youth, this was
notorious for being one of the few places in town where you
could buy pornography. What a prophetic observation. I
wonder if GC knew this about this joint, too. When we got
there, the confused cashier slipped us an envelope and told
us that’s all he knew. We asked him if we could put one of
our Meat Machine stickers on him, and he said “whatever
you’re supposed to do I guess.”
In the envelope was a phony porno magazine (all the
naughty bits were covered with little ape heads, but it was
still nasty) and several photocopies of upc codes on
transparent paper.
The porn wasn’t much of a hint, but we read through it
anyway. It had a dirty story about an older woman and
younger man, with several references to France. We tried
to figure out what France had to do with it. GC told us we’d
need to use the clue in Wal Mart across the street.
In WalMart, I think the intention was that we’d use the upc
codes on the aisle scanners you find throughout the store
to identify what they were for. But being the Meat Machine,
we went right up to the cashier and asked her to scan them
for us. And she did it!! Then after she finished, she then
asked us what it was for!! So weird. I mean, we were seven
people in suits and labcoats with official-looking ID badges,
microphone headsets, and all kinds of video camera and
gear. And she never once thought to ask us before she did
it. The night shift is a great place.
The codes were for canned goods, so we headed over to
that aisle. We realized there were little dots on the
transparencies, so we wrapped them around the cans lining
up the upc codes to see where the dots fell on the can
labels. This was the correct method, as it turns out, but we
couldn’t see anything. So we bought the cans, went to the
van, took the labels off, and taped them to the
transparencies and held them up to the light. Still nothing
conclusive. We wrote down the letters that were close, then
called GC and asked if it was an anagram. They told us no,
so we were positive we were on the wrong track.
An hour later, and very frustrated, we called GC in
desperation. They said then that it WAS an anagram, and
they were sorry for giving us bad information earlier. To
make up for it, they told us the letters we had that were
wrong, and told us the first two words of the anagram, “end
of.”
In time, and with the aid of wordsmith.org, we found the rest
of the angaram. End of Fountain St.
Other teams had similar problems with this clue. But we
figured even if it worked properly, the fifteen letter, four
word, one abbreviation anagram would have been next to
impossible to solve.
At the end of Fountain St we saw a transient lying behind a
rock in some blankets. Several members of our team,
heeding the advice we were given at the beginning of the
game (“It is wise to be kind to those less fortunate than
you”), approached the tramp with the cans and money. He
rewarded us by giving us an envelope AND by letting us put
a Meat Machine sticker on him!
The envelope contained a one-line cipher which at first
glance appeared to be polyalphabetic, so we went with
vignere and tried to solve for its keyword.
After studying it for a minute, we figured out that it WAS
NOT vignere, but was much easier. There were five words
under the cipher with their corresponding ciphertext, and at
first we thought they would lead us to a five-letter keyword.
They were actually a huge hint to the code. Each word was
casear shifted, but the first letter was kept intact. We put
each word in the cipher through a casear shift sans the first
letter, and got the answer pretty quick from there.
The directions told us to go to the intersection of Cedar
Glade and Sunset Trail. Sunset Trail isn’t a road, though. It’
s an actual trail that runs up the side of the mountain. We
parked and saw another car, but were pretty sure it wasn’t
part of the game. It had Texas plates and had bags inside.
We were pretty scared to walk down the trail, so we called
GC and asked them what they wanted us to do. They said
we shouldn’t need to go all the way down the trail, but that
we’d need to use our ‘third eye’ since we couldn’t see the
clue with our eyes.
GC told us before the game we would need to bring digital
cameras and video cameras, so we figured that was what
they meant. We thought the clue might be on LEDs, but we
scanned and scanned the woods with our cameras and saw
nothing.
Then Team Ninja Squad showed up and things got weird.
We found out later they were listening in on our walkie talkie
frequency, and heard me say something about trying the
other side of the trail, so when they got there Greg ran up
the other side of the trail. Then they took off down the
other side. We didn’t know they were listening in on our
radios, and we figured they had a hint from GC we didn’t
have, so we followed them down the trail.
Eventually we felt bad about following them, so we walked
back up the trail and called GC to see if we could get
another hint. They told us there would be a marker on the
ground on the trail that showed us where to look. I was
pretty sure I had seen it on the way down, so we went back.
Sure enough, there was a stick on the ground pointing the
way. We looked through the video camera and saw the
blinking LEDs in the woods down the trail. But before we
could take off after it, the Ninja Squad came back up the
trail. Most of them just walked past us, but Jim Chonko
stayed and lingered around to see what we would do. We
stood around looking confused and chitchating about what
we should do next. Jay ran up the trail saying “I’ll go check
the other side of the trail.” We did everything we could to
throw them off, but either because they were smart, we were
bad actors, or because they were spying on our walkie
talkie frequency, Jim didn’t leave.
So we said fuck it and took off down the trail, with no
flashlights, using a video camera to find our way. It was a
rough trip in the dark, running into trees and briars and
falling down, but we found it, it was a big black sign with
LEDs spelling “HSIT”.
When we got to the top of the trail, the Ninjas had took off.
We didn’t understand what happened, how they could have
got to the clue before us. In the end we found out they didn’
t. But I have no idea why they left.
Team Yellow Tanks showed up right as we got to the top of
the hill. The game was getting tight!!! To confuse them, I
said “lets just drive somewhere where we can get cell
reception so I can call Game Control for a hint.” I don’t think
they were listening, though. They just took off down the
trail.
As we drove down the hill we through out several guesses
at “HSIT”, one of which was the IT bus, the local
transportation. We called GC on a wild guess and said “we
are headed to the Transportation Depot, just checking in.”
GC said “ok, great.” Score.
When we got there, there was a man in a PT Cruiser waiting
for us. He told us that we would need to sacrafice a
member of our team to “dance with the devil”, and that
person could bring no walkie talkies or cell phones, and
would not be in communication with the team.
We huddled for a second and guessed that whoever was
going would need to find their way back possibly, or at least
be able to direct us to them. So we picked Jack for his
knowledge of Hot Springs. It turned out to be a wise choice,
but not because of his directional abilities, because of other
skills he posessed.
The man blindfolded Jack and led him to the PT Cruiser,
and gave us a clue. He told us we had to work on the clue
for at least one hour before calling Game Control for any
hints.
We solved it in about twenty minutes.
It turns out, it was one of the hardest clues for most teams
to solve, and was the real breaking point for many teams
who were on the verge of quitting. That really disappointed
me because I thought the clue was fairly easy, which isn’t a
knock on GC at all. The only reason people thought it was
so hard was they were unable to look at it as anything other
than what it appeared to be. That shows a real lack of
understanding of the game. I’ll explain:
The clue was a four page document. The first page was of
an electrical schematic, which listed several resistors,
transistors, capacitors, and diodes with markings such as
R1, D3, T2, etc. Every other page was a list of “parts used
in this project” and listed about 35-40 different properties
for each resistor, transistor, etc, all numbered. There was
also a list that corresponded to the schematic on the front
page, giving the properties for each part in the project.
If you looked up the properties for each part in your project,
then looked it up on the longer list, you got a part number.
What struck us immediately was that even though all the
part lists were over 35 parts long, none of the parts in our
project were over #26.
We mapped each part number to letters, and replaced the
R1s and T2s and whatnot in the schematic with letters, and
it spelled out an address.
Most teams struggled with the clue because they thought
they would have to actually build the project. But the first
thing our team thought was “this has nothing to do with
electronics.” Why? Because it would be stupid for GC to
give us a clue that a very very small number of people
would be able to do. We knew GC expected every team to
solve the clue, and we knew that GC didn’t think every team
could build an electronic project or even understand it in
under an hour. Furthermore we knew that the solution
would give us either an address or a phone number. So we
approached it as a code.
This clue solidified what would soon become a two-hour
lead on all teams.
The address took us to a house out towards the airport.
We walked up the long driveway to the scary house, and
outside of the house a light was trained on a table with a
ouija board on it, and a table with some instructions.
The instructions were a letter from Koko Co, the company
that produced the pregame video. It introduced us to their
newest product, the Ultra Mega Ouija Board or something
like that. It told us that the Board responded to “chaining,”
which was a system of asking questions where each
question had to include the answer to the last question.
When TC approached the Ouija Board to begin, he reached
out to grab the viewpiece and it moved away from his
hand!!! It was the coolest thing. We simply stood there and
asked questions out loud, and the Ouija board would
respond all on its own. So creepy.
It turned out the spirit was named Captain Howdy, just like in
the Exorcist, and that the spirit knew where Jack was. It told
us to go to Spencer’s Corner. We wasted no time.
We were pretty excited after that clue. It was well done. We
noticed the camera trained on the board, but ignored it and
played along. We called GC to give them our approval of
the clue by cheering for them.
When we got to Spencers Corner, the elevator started
moving down like someone had sent it to us. It was an eerie
touch, one that didn’t go unnoticed. We got on the elevator
and rode to the top floor, then made our way down floor by
floor by stairs looking for the right store. We found it when
we heard loud music thumping from one of the empty
storefronts.
Inside we found something so strange its hard to explain.
The room was all black with red lights, and several members
of teams huddled at one end of the room, at the other end
stood a member of GC, dressed up in red tights as a devil,
and weilding a pitchfork. The music was thumping and the
devil said “DANCE, you must DANCE to continue” and the
kidnapped team members were all dancing. Jack never
looked so happy to see us. He came running towards us
with an envelope. We took the fuck off out of there.
Jack told us he was the first person there (of course) and
that they told him to dance. He figured how hard he danced
would affect the clue we got, so he danced his ass off. At
the finish line, GC was so amused by Jack’s moves they
showed the video to all the teams. I have to hand it to Jack,
if he really thought that he was going to get a good clue for
his moves, he really took one for the team. Think Napoleon
Dynamite.
The clue was on a computer disk, and was an animated gif
of a man doing semaphore flags. We had semaphore in
our code book, so it only took a few moments to crack it. It
was telling us to go back to the house with the enigma. So
away we went.
This time the typewriters were gone, and instead all that
was in the room was a dead body and a pool of blood on
the ground. Here is where our team got lucky.
In the beginning of the game, we were given a list of rules.
Several of these rules seemed cryptic, or corny, or both.
The last rule was a reference to some episode of Coach
where he got some kind of disease or something. We
laughed at it as if it was just a corny joke, which is
disappointing because looking back it was so obviously a
clue. If we would have googled the condition, we would
have known exactly where in the body to find our clue.
Instead we just rummaged through the fake guts and blood
with our hands until we found a “kidney” that said Movie
Gallery on it (it was a movie gallery balloon filled with flour).
It was the only organ in the body with any writing on it, and
we had already been to Movie Gallery once tonight, so we
called GC and said “We think we need to go to the Movie
Gallery” and they confirmed it.
What sucks is that we missed the clue entirely. The clue
was lodged in one of the bodies arteries I guess, and we
needed to know which one to look in. You could squeeze
the clue out, and it was seven different baseball players. If
you found their jersey numbers, it gave you a phone
number. All in all, it sounds like a decent clue, but we left
thinking it was lame. And messy. I had fake blood all over
my hands arms and coat all night.
We actually ended up spending a stupid amount of time on
this clue since we solved it wrong. There are 4 Movie
Galleries in town, and we went to every one of them since
we never called the number and heard the message. At
one of them on Grand, we thought we found the clue when
we saw that the TV screens inside had some kind of weird
message on them. After looking at them with binoculars we
made out the words, but after calling GC realized we were in
the wrong place.
The right Movie Gallery had a list of movies hanging in the
window that said “Midnight Special”. Each movie had a list
of the actors that were in them, but one actor was wrong.
Our first guess was to order the movies by release date,
then count down the list of actors to the wrong one, and
make a phone number. We managed to come up with a
local number that way, and convinced ourselves it couldn’t
be a coincidence. It was, though. Nobody answered the
number, and GC told us to look at xylophones initially, a
refernece to the Midnight Madness movie. We took the
initials of the wrong actors and anagrammed them to form
the words “spencers corner.” Back again…
So this is where the Casino clue was supposed to be. The
idea was that to slow down the teams in front, teams would
have to play blackjack, but their chips would vary depending
on how many hints they had asked for during the game.
The trouble was that our team got their well in front of the
other teams with ZERO penalty hints, so we would be
allowed to move on and other teams behind us would be
held up even more, so the goal of slowing down teams in
front was shot. So they scrapped it and instead gave us a
clue and told us to slow down, get some coffee, hang out.
We didn’t take their advice, we ran to the van to work on the
next clue.
It was a postcard that had a quote on it and a nautical flag.
The quote was “when person for whatever reason has the
chance to lead an exceptional life, he has no right to keep it
to himself.” Josh correctly recognized the quote being from
the movie Rushmore, but the quote was from Jacques
Cousteau. We drove to the Hot Springs Aquarium, but GC
told us we were in the wrong place. We looked up dive
shops in the phone book. One was far away, the other was
REALLY far away. We chose the one that was less far, and
we were correct.
GC says we got to this clue too early. They intended for
teams to get here after the Scuba Shop was open, and the
clue was going to be inside. Instead they sent a member of
GC out to give us the clue to work on in our van and then
give back.
It was a CD player rigged up to a pulsating LED, a battery,
some wire, a photostatic cell, and some headphones. Josh
really went after this clue. He figured out what to do pretty
quickly. You had to make a complete circuit in order to hear
what was being played on the CD. In order to do this you
had to wire the photo cell to the headphone jack correctly,
then use the cell to “hear” what was being played through
the pulsating LED.
The CD told us to go to the Gulpha Gorge. I sure wonder
how the clue looked inside the scuba shop. Somebody said
something about having to fish it out of a tank or something.
At the Gorge Ampitheater, there were three sheets under a
rock that said “do not remove.” Each sheet had a list of TV
theme songs and a number and letter. At this point we had
identified several, but nowhere close to all, of the TV
songs. We figured we should finish it now, so we sat in the
van at the gorge and worked furiously on it. We worked on
it for over an hour before we saw another team show up at
the Gorge. Sadly, as we struggled with this clue, we saw
like five teams show up at the Gorge to get the clue.
We comforted ourselves by saying “oh this clue is hard, it
will take them just as long to get it as us.” We were so
wrong.
Every other team not only identified the songs earlier in the
night, they plugged them in to the graph paper correctly.
We were writing the names in the right places, but writing
them vertically instead of horizontally, which placed all the
letters in the wrong boxes, which is why we couldn’t see the
solution.
After a few panicked calls to GC we figured we could still
solve it without going back and redoing it all. In the end the
page had a drawing on it of the Mountain Tower.
We sped towards the tower, but realized the Yellow Tanks
were on the long, twisty road ahead of us. We were sure
this was the finish line, so we all lamented that we were
about to lose. On the way up the road, we saw a member of
the Hagglers literally running up the side of the mountain to
try to beat us all.
When we reached the top, we jumped out of the van and
ran inside, where several teams were crowded around the
front cashier buying tokens to go up the elevator. Josh
slapped a hundred dollar bill on the counter and we all
jumped the turnstile and went up. In the elevator with us
were several other team memembers. If this was the finish
line up here, it was going to be messy.
Luckily it was not the finish line, it was another clue. But the
top five or six teams were ALL HERE, clumped together,
250 feet over the city.
The hint from GC was to scan the skies where we danced
with the devil. We looked down on Spencers Corner with
the telescopes on top of the tower and saw a sign that said
simply “13.”
Here is where things got hairy.
Josh, Jay, and I went down to the bottom and to the van to
work out the clue. TC, Jack, and Jess stayed up on top for
some reason. None of them had their walkie talkies, and
our cell phone battery was dead. We sat in the van and
solved the clue, then called GC and said “we think we need
to go to the 13th clue, the ouija board house.” GC said
“yeah, ok!” and sounded excited. Nobody had left the tower
yet. We could win!!
But they were still up there.
I didn’t want to go up, because I could just see myself going
up while they came down. So we just waited and waited.
Eventually I got my cell to come on long enough to write
down TCs phone number and we called him and told them
to come down. But in the time it took, we saw three other
teams speed away from the tower.
What we didn’t know at the time was that those three teams
were all driving to Spencer’s Corner for some reason, as if
there were more information there. All three!! What a lucky
break for us.
We drove towards the finish line totally depressed that not
only were we in 4th, but that we were quite sure we solved
the final clue first and still got beat by our own stupidity for
splitting up. It was a gutwrenching drive.
When we got to the house and saw the monkey dancing
around, and nobody else’s vans, we were stunned. When I
got out of the van I said “Did we actually win?” and Mike
from GC said “I don’t know, did you take back the video?”
The video!!!
When we got the video the night before, it said on the
receipt it was due back the next morning. It never occurred
to us until now, when it hit us like a ton of bricks. We drove
so fast to the video store that by the time we got back,
everything in our van was pressed against the back
window. As we drove back up the driveway after taking
back the video and saw all of GC jumping up and down and
cheering, we knew we had won an improbable victory.
Incidentally, nobody took back the video, but if just one of
the top three teams would have remembered, they would
have won the game.
