![]() Hall always believed it was possible to solve. One hint was provided: “My name is Satoshi”. The man in the photo is smiling, ever so slightly. The photo on the card was deliberately obtuse: a selfie of a man of Asian appearance with some European-looking, wooden-beamed houses behind him. Hall heard about it through the player community but didn’t see it in print until a friend sent her one some time later. A year into the game, the Billion to One card (silver, naturally) was released. Besides, many of the puzzles required a collaborative effort. ![]() Solving them earned points that would notch players up a leaderboard, but really the competition was with themselves. The cards were ranked from red (easy) to silver (hardest). The cards were designed as standalone brainteasers, though some contained hints for the Cube hunt or details that brought players deeper into the Perplex City universe. The puzzle cards – sold in packs – were how Mind Candy monetised the game. Her personality at the time, she says, was “secret librarian”. ![]() Instead, she took a lead managing the player wiki – cataloguing information as the game progressed. The characters had personal email addresses too, though Hall was “always too shy” to write to them. When another, Anna Heath, was murdered, the players delivered 333 origami cranes to the Mind Candy office as a token of remembrance. ![]() When one character, Violet Kiteway, asked players to write her a book, they published (and sold) an anthology called Tales from the Third Planet. There was an online newspaper, The Sentinel, which players could contribute to a record label, Hesh Records, that released an album and “living” characters with active blogs. Playing Perplex City meant following a detailed plot – awash with murder and conspiracy – that unfolded in real-time across numerous sources woven with clues, much of which was crafted by lead writer Naomi Alderman, who went on to write novels including The Power. She found herself in a world that was rich, intricate and truly inter-dimensional. “The thing that drew me to these games, and the immersive genre more broadly, is that the potential for adventure is there, if you're willing to take the leap,” Hall says. Two decades after Masquerade sparked a national frenzy, P erplex City used the architecture of the internet to construct not just a treasure hunt, but a parallel universe that was accessed via the computer screen. Like Alice in Wonderland meets The Matrix, it was conceived as a 21st century version of Masquerade, a puzzle book by Kit Williams that was published in 1979 and contained clues to the location of a golden hare buried somewhere in England. She also appreciates how a good story can transform a puzzle into something transportative. “Well, I still haven’t solved all the puzzles.” Hall is what you could call a completist. It was a race to locate the “Receda Cube”, a spiritual artifact valuable to the residents of Perplex City, a fictional extraterrestrial society where puzzles – and the ability to crack them – are valued above all. Players navigated an immersive story while solving clues found in puzzle cards sold in shops, and in every form of media available: websites, live events, voicemails and text messages. Darley had reached the finish line of Perplex City, an alternate reality game launched in 2005 which saw 50,000 players embark on a scavenger hunt guided by a complex web of puzzles that blurred real and virtual worlds. “That was when I knew I’d found the Cube.”įour days later, Darley walked into the office of Mind Candy, a gaming company based in London, to present his find and claim a £100,000 prize. “That was when it hit me,” he recounted later on his website. Six inches deep it struck a solid object. Someone had disturbed the earth in the recent past… or perhaps buried something? He dropped to his knees, grabbed a trowel and plunged the metal into the dirt. The surface of the ground beside him seemed different the topsoil was mixed with clay. It was getting light and he was running out of ideas. The previous night he had caught a glimpse of a torch in the darkness – if he didn’t find what he was looking for soon, someone else would. Darley, a web designer from Middlesex, near London, had made three trips here in as many days. The clock was ticking – others were closing in. ON SUNDAY FEBRUARY 4, 2007, as the Sun rose over Wakerley Great Wood in Northamptonshire, Andy Darley trudged into the ancient forest with a map and a spade, and began to dig.
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