In 2017, my MIT Mystery Hunt team, Death and Mayhem, found the Coin first. I wasn’t actually at MIT at the time. I was helping out as best I could from the great state of Iowa.
The horrible fate of each winning team is that they have to design the following year’s Hunt. For me this was a dream come true: I admired the Mystery Hunt from afar for years, and it was really exciting just to be on a competing team when I joined D&M in 2015. Over the course of 2017 I got to help make the MIT Mystery Hunt which feels like a fictional sentence even now.
Then MLK Day Weekend of 2018 appeared, and I went to Boston to help with Hunt operations in whatever way I could. That was the plan, anyway.
I must have caught something on the plane ride, which probably interacted with the incredible stress of the epic undertaking I had involved myself in, and I fell ill. I was out of commission for like 70% of the weekend. WHOOPS
So let’s get back to 2017: I got to contribute a whole bunch of different things to this Mystery Hunt, and I’m very proud of them, and now, four months later for some reason, I’m devoting a blog post to bragging about them.
This page explains the basics of what was going on pretty well, and this is what the Web side of the Hunt looked like (with all the puzzles unlocked). There’s a ton of really great puzzles (and great art/UI work) in there, and you should check it all out. If you’re unfamiliar with the Mystery Hunt in general, you gotta check out the archives, because we are talking about REAMS of some of the CLEVEREST PUZZLE MATERIAL IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. It is an immense honor for my work to be included in these archives. To wit:
Temperance
James Douberly designed this puzzle, but he was kind of busy running the team, so I “built” it out of the dataset he had created—that is to say, he put together the concept and mechanics, and I picked the clues and created the “art” (such as it is). If you’re looking at these images and wondering how the heck they constitute a puzzle, check out the solution and you’ll see what solvers had to figure out. It may be hard to believe but this was an easy one.
Let’s Get Ready to Jumble
Hubert Hwang designed these Jumbles, which are of course more than they seem at first glance, and I made the art. I had a bunch of fun using halftone shading, to make them look like newspaper Jumble illustrations as much as possible, but when my illustrations got scaled down for the puzzle page, they came out as plain old shades of gray. How did I not anticipate this?
Pokémon Island
One round of the Hunt was Pokémon themed and i did all the round page artwork oh my gosh
the rival at the bottom is me
Twitch Plays Mystery Hunt
The archived version of this puzzle is, um, not working as of this writing. It was basically a Twitch Plays Pokemon kind of thing. It was very cute.
Under Control
When a team solved Twitch Plays Mystery Hunt, it “evolved” into Under Control, which must be seen to be believed, or indeed be fully understood.
I made the art for both these puzzles (and wrote the “dialog” for Under Control); they turned out to be very memorable and in the scheme of things were huge successes, even if their extraction steps didn’t turn out to be super smooth for some teams. I feel very very proud of both of them, but Hubert and Ben and Xavid and Quentin are the ones who did all the backend stuff that made them actually work, and there’s a limit to how much credit I can really take.
I Wanna Be the Very Best
This was the requisite scavenger hunt with ridiculous rules. On the day before I flew into Boston, James asked me to make some actual art for the Path to Triumph maze, which up to that point had been a spreadsheet. I’m very proud of how goofy it turned out. And I’m really proud of that Gyarados.
Scouting Challenge
I also did the art for a walking-around-campus puzzle where you had to match up real objects with my spooky drawings. I especially like the one with the demon-wolves.
Brainstorm
This was another walking-around-campus puzzle and I’m just going to link to the solution because as far as I can tell you can’t try this puzzle for yourself anymore, even if you’re at MIT as you read this! Hi!
In addition to following cryptic directions leading them around campus, solvers had to use props they’dacquired earlier to interact with things in the environment. These props included a laser pointer and an iron key, which interacted with posters containing a photosensitive circuit and a ferrosensitive circuit, respectively.
As my plane landed in Boston, roughly 24 hours before the Hunt was to begin, I got a series of Slack notifications, the upshot of which was “We need posters containing a photosensitive circuit and a ferrosensitive circuit respectively, could you make those please?”
Fortunately, having anticipated such a contingency, I had some arts and crafts supplies in my luggage.
The Lurking Horror II: The Lurkening
This puzzle is a text adventure. I came up with the puzzle mechanic and I designed it and I wrote it and I programmed it and other people tested it and found bugs and I fixed those bugs and the result is, in my opinion, a very good text adventure that can be enjoyed even in contexts entirely divorced from the surrounding puzzle hunt structure—but it was in fact a part of the MIT Mystery Hunt. I know, right?
There’s also a basically identical version hosted at rcveeder dot net because I can do whatever I want.