Guest Post by BellosTheMighty

As we all know, most armchair treasure hunts start with a book, or some other physical media. But some have started off as video games or other born-digital media. With the day off from work, I’ve been sitting at home bored and decided to make a list of some. Feel free to add on any others you’ve heard of- especially those that might still be unsolved.

Pimania: Released in 1982, it was probably the first game-based hunt, and one of the most successful. In a bit of a twist on the formula, the treasure wasn’t buried. Instead, the prize- a jeweled object d’art- had to be claimed from the organizers in person. The clues would point hunters to a specific place, time, and day of the year to meet them.

Amusingly, the winning team didn’t get the solution *exactly* right- they waited at the mouth of a chalk figure, instead of the rear-end as they were supposed to do- but after having spent the twenty-second of July squatting in the bushes waiting for a winner four years running, the organizers decided that was close enough.

Hareraiser: Remember that guy who cheated to win Masquerade? Well, a few years after, he tried to do an encore by offering up the golden hare as a prize for a similar hunt based off this game. Unfortunately, Hareraiser sold poorly and was savaged by critics as one of the worst games ever. (Splitting it into two full-price games probably didn’t help.) The hunt was never solved, and later became moot after the company went bankrupt and the hare was sold at auction.

SwordQuest: Not technically a hunt, but with some aspects of one. SwordQuest was a series of four Atari 2600 games, each built around a metapuzzle. The reward for solving each game’s metapuzzle was an object d’art worth $25,000, with the four winners being invited to compete for an additional prize worth $50,000. Long story short, the video game crash of 1984 hit, and the hunt was called off. The Angry Video Game Nerd did a video on it awhile back with some details: Watch Video

Aurem: An obscure CD-ROM game from 1998. I don’t know much about it, but apparently the hunt was abruptly called off after two years under somewhat dubious circumstances. Notable enough to have a page on the UK’s Armchair Treasure Hunt Club’s website.

The Stone: A online puzzle game that I played for awhile back when it was new. Originally a set of a few dozen puzzles, with more released frequently (though not as frequently as the community would have liked). The puzzles, as well as a number of real-life treasure hunts for buried clues, were originally supposed to lead up to a grand metapuzzle called “The Enigma”, but the game changed managers several times and the original plan was probably changed or lost along the way. It did eventually have a winner, though, if wikipedia is to be belived.

Cicada 3301: This is a weird one. Back in 2012, an unknown individual posted a cryptic image to 4chan that wound up being the first step in a breadcrumb trail of puzzles leading around the internet and real life. Who was behind it all or what the prize was, if any, is a mystery to this day.

The later stages of the hunt were an invitation-only affair, with participants ordered to keep all puzzles secret and not collaborate on solutions. An unverifiable but plausible account from one of the alleged winners said that the hunt was a hacker group’s attempt to recruit people skilled in cryptography for the purposes of developing internet privacy solutions.

But the project bombed because the people they got were more interested in puzzle-solving then software development, and most of them bailed. There have since been several subsequent Cicada-like puzzle competitions, but which are from the same group and which are copycats is anybody’s guess. YouTube user LEMMiNO compiled a brief-ish summary here: Watch Video

TimeHunt: A puzzle website built using flash. The puzzles were linked together around a story involving astronomy, time travel, and alchemy that allegedly contained clues to the location of a valuable buried object d’art. Some of the top-level puzzles were created in collaboration with famous and semi-famous figures in the arts and sciences, including the late Terry Pratchett.

I played it a bit in the early days, and would describe the execution as “charmingly inept”. The commercial strategy was to finance this all with clickthrough advertising- companies would pay to host hints somewhere on their websites, and a hints page would direct hunters to these sites. The idea didn’t work because A) potential advertisers thought it was stupid, and B) the developer would repeatedly give away hints for free on treasure hunt message boards.

There were also multiple incidents where the community would get stymied on one puzzle for weeks, all the while being nudged gently forward by the playful developer, only for him to realize that the puzzle was actually bugged and he needed to fix it. TimeHunt also named its white rabbit mascot Cunningculus, which is the second-worst bit of accidentally dirty writing I’ve ever seen in a treasure hunt. Anyway, the site has since gone down. According to one prominent hunter, the community got all the way to the final puzzle, but never managed to locate the treasure: (more on that story)

Incidentally, Pratchett’s contribution, a Discworld short story called “Death, and What Comes Next”, has since been republished on the internet and still contains the hidden phrase that unlocked the next puzzle in TimeHunt: (more on that story)

Both The Binding of Issac: Afterbirth and Trials: Fusion had Easter Eggs in their games then spun out into treasure hunts. Gameranx on youtube has some details.

And, not quite related, but Cliff Johnson, who created the puzzles in Mysterious Stranger and Astana, also did a number of well-respected metapuzzle video games, for download on his website: Cliff Johnson’s Website

That’s all I know. Feel free to add on to this thread if you know any more!