Comment by adrianhon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adrianhon | Hacker News Reader

Lead designer of Perplex City here! Perplex City was an ARG (alternate reality game) produced by Mind Candy in 2004. Unlike almost all ARGs at the time, it wasn’t promoting a movie or TV or associated product - instead, we sold packs of puzzle cards that tied into the game’s story.

Lots more on Wikipedia here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perplex_City

This is a puzzle card I thought would either be solved very quickly (within a year or two) or not at all. To have it solved after 14 years is very special.

Perplex City has had a lot of interesting alumni. It was made by Mind Candy, which was founded by Michael Acton Smith, who is also co-founder of Calm. The lead writer was Naomi Alderman, who became an award-winning novelist and whose novel The Power was one of Obama’s top books of the year and is being adapted into a $100m Amazon TV show.

I went on to co-found Six to Start with my brother Dan Hon (who you may know from his popular newsletter, and later left the company to do a lot of good work in the US government digital services realm and Code for America). Six to Start is best known for Zombies, Run!, which is the world’s most popular smartphone fitness game and is sort of like an ARG, if you squint at it.

I continue to do a lot of thinking and writing around ARGs (which are still fascinating) and gamification (which I mostly dislike). My blog post, What ARGs Can Teach Us About QAnon, went somewhat viral a few months ago: https://mssv.net/2020/08/02/what-args-can-teach-us-about-qan...

Edit: That blog post also gets into the confusion between the Perplex City Satoshi and the Bitcoin Satoshi (which conspiratorially-minded people DM me about regularly) along with my supposed involvement in Cicada 3301.

I honestly can't believe there's a front page Hacker News post about Perplex City today. I was literally searching for cards on eBay last night. I would love to see a game like Perplex City return some day. It was one of the first ARGs I followed on Unfiction, and it helped introduce me to the world of puzzling and puzzle hunts, and also helped push me towards my current career path. So, I guess I want to say thank you for working on such a unique and interesting game that had a massive positive influence on me when I was a teenager. It was so exciting to see the mid-2000s internet work together in a whirlwind of multimedia creativity.

Also, this is completely random, but do you happen to know if there's a warehouse somewhere with a bunch of unopened boxes of Perplex City cards? I always keep an eye out for cards, but it's hard to find people selling things from a game that ended over a decade ago.

The surplus stock was incinerated. Source: wished at mind candy in the early 2010s

I deeply miss the golden era of ARGs circa the 2000s. I keep feeling the impulse to log onto the Unfiction Forums and check what's going on, but alas, even those are gone now! Without a central watering hole, I think it'll be that much harder for the medium to come back—everything's siloed into separate Discords now, without a single sustaining community. It's not really possible to lurk or hop between games anymore, and scattershot chat messages are harder to catch up on than forum threads, and don't preserve as well or make for very good reading after a game is over.

I'm probably younger than most of the crowd that was involved in that ARG scene, so I wanna say thanks for helping to create a piece of my childhood! I actually remember the name Six to Start and that there was a lot of hope behind it when it launched, so I'm glad to hear it's doing well.

Indeed, I still listen to the I Love Bees radio drama every couple years. I was in high school while that was happening and even took a day off school to go answer a payphone at the nearby University, where I met some older nerds :) Fond memories.

Thanks! There are still new ARGs out there, though IMO not as focused on narrative or worldbuilding (especially through websites) as those in the 2000s. You're right about the fractured community, and I think to some extent ARGs are getting less accessible because they're hyper-targeted to specific communities that might be harder to discover or join.

Six to Start is doing well and we still play around with ARG-like ideas in Zombies, Run! for our seasonal virtual races :)

Just want to express my admiration for what you and the team did with perplex city. Thank you for making something so damn cool.

The believable near future sci-fi. The beautiful art and design work. The binding of a community from all across the globe long before it was the norm. It was a palpable universe.

Sucks that it ended when it did, but I'll always cherish the veritable mountains of quality content we got.

Awesome to see it solved! May I ask how Satoshi himself was chosen? Does he have connections to the game founders in some way?

Yes – I can't recall precisely who it was who knew him (or was friends of friends) but it was one of the Mind Candy team. We were obviously worried that people might figure out who he was through these social connections but it didn't happen that way in the end!

Edit: The puzzle card was designed by Jey Biddulph so possibly it was him who knew Satoshi!

Perplex City was great, thanks so much for all you did on it! Fondly remember the community that built up around solving these. I lucked in to being the first to solve one of the silvers (Differently Lethal), and remember all the efforts to solve this one back in the day.

Perplex City was awesome, and I still miss it. It had a really unique storytelling mechanism, the cards were generally pretty fun, high production values.

I thought the second season suffered a bit when they introduced human actors as characters, instead of just illustrations. It lost a bit of charm. And as a Euro-centric game it was harder as an American to be as involved. But it was still a great multi-platform experience. I would love to see something like it again (or even work on such a game)

Now that this puzzle is solved, can you explain how it was intended to be solved?

It was solved using reverse image search, which was present when this puzzle was created but not very reliable for uncommon images. So it's likely that you did not intend for it to be solved via a reverse image search.

So what was the intended way to arrive at the solution?

> Now that this puzzle is solved, can you explain how it was intended to be solved?

It says that it was supposed to be a test of the "six degrees of separation" theory. So presumably the idea was that if every player asked everyone they knew if they recognized the guy, there was a reasonable chance that someone would.

I loved Perplex City, and had a small pocket of friends working on the puzzles at the time!

Thank you for providing this behind the scenes, and for your initial work on the game itself. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on your blog.

Thanks :) I still hold a soft spot for ARGs and I’m sure it’s something I’ll come back to again, one day.

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