#perplex city

[alterum-art]

OMG THEY DID IT

THEY FOUND SATOSHI! THE LAST PERPLEX CITY PUZZLE SOLVED! It’s amazing how a 10 year old ARG to find a singe man can finally be solved with enough time!  Can’t wait for whenever the next Perplex City season to be  released.  Seeing as how you have time in quarantine, take a look a some ARG’s, it’s a whole new kind of amazing. Brand new world and a brand new game.

[dinersaturn]

SATOSHI HAS BEEN FOUND! It’s been 15 years but the ARG apparently has been solved!!??

[thismustbetheblog]

hi guys here’s a thing/puzzle i’ve just become obsessed with

please watch

[lazypoststhings]

Man, I just found out that the Unfiction.com forums have shut down (quite a while back too shows how much I pay attention) and that makes me really sad. This website/forum was such a huge part of my early-mid teens and I was hoping to one day go back through all the archived threads about I Love Bees and Perplex City. Speaking of Perplex City it seems the creators went on to make some kind of Neopets ripoff aimed at kids instead of another project similar in scale to PC which is incredibly disappointing.

Y’know what the next time I go back to my parent’s house I’m gonna dig up my Perplex City cards.

Also:

Unsolved cards

As of February 2010, two cards from the first season are yet to be solved:

Riemann (S1, Card #238) apparently asks players to prove the Riemann hypothesis.

Billion to One (S1, Card #256) features the face of a man, with a caption in Japanese that reads 私を見つけなさい, which roughly translates to "Please Find Me." His image has been spread to social networking sites, in attempts to locate and make contact with this person.

I’m so happy that Billion to One was never solved, the puzzle was literally to find this random Japanese dude, the ultimate test of Six Degrees of Separation. This asshole has haunted my dreams for over a decade.

[pyroxpyro]

Have you seen this man? 

It’s almost been ten years since the conclusion of the first season of Perplex City; an alternate reality game that was published way back in 2006 in by Mind Candy. 

The London based company captivated many with it’s interesting gameplan: a very important artifact from a city beyond the stars had been stolen and hidden somewhere on our very own earth. The people of the city enjoyed brain teasers and puzzles, and thus clues were dished out to players in the same manner. Once the cube was located, the person who found it would be granted £100,000 ((or $200,000)) as a prize for winning the game. And the game was won about two years once it was released.

Some puzzles were in the form of trading cards that were purchased at stores in the UK and various online outlets. Players would earn points for solving the riddles and brainteasers on the cards ((which varied in difficulty depending on the color of the card itself)) and the backs of most cards contained either another part of a bigger puzzle or a piece of a map of the fictional city.

To this day, there are still two unsolved cards. One of the cards asks players to prove the Riemann Hypothesis, a mathematical theory. The creators of the game stated that this card is impossible to solve, even to current day. The second card, however, has their lips sealed: Billion To One. 

The card shows a picture of a man standing in front of a stream with some buildings behind him. The text on the card is in Japanese, and roughly translates to “Find Me”. There are no other clues, the back of the card is just a section of the overall map of the city and contacting the tip line that had been in place simply stated that the man’s name is Satoshi. There were no other clues about the mysterious man or his whereabouts. 

After doing some research, some players were able to put together that the photo had been taken in Kaysersberg, Alsace, France. No further solid information had been uncovered in 12 years. There were various leads that went cold; a large Japanese presence in the area at one time that is no longer prominent, a few possible employers contacted, and a thorough search online of anything pertaining to the town. 

The card appears to be a social experiment to see if a person can be located anywhere in the world with just a picture of their face and their first name. A decade ago, it seems to have been impossible. Today may be another story. With the various social media options available, there is certainly someone online who has contact with this man. The only way to solve this final mystery is to spread the word.

Who knows what answers this man has to questions fans of the game asked and have forgotten after many years? As there is no sequel to the first season ((the second season of the game, Perplex City Stories, was suddenly put on hold just three months after it’s debut with only the explanation that the game was ‘less than perfect’ and a vow by the team that it will begin anew in the future)), this mystery has long since been buried and mostly forgotten. Maybe now is a good time to dig it up and attempt to solve a puzzle that’s had people stumped for over ten years.

[transpondster]

A mystery cube, a secret identity, and a puzzle solved after 15 years

In 2005, an alternate reality game asked players to find a man named Satoshi based just on a photograph. Fifteen years later, the mystery was solved

Hall took that leap. She found herself in a world that was rich, intricate and truly inter-dimensional. 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. 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. When one character, Violet Kiteway, asked players to write her a book, they published (and sold) an anthology called Tales from the Third Planet. When another, Anna Heath, was murdered, the players delivered 333 origami cranes to the Mind Candy office as a token of remembrance. Darley says he even shed a tear. The characters had personal email addresses too, though Hall was “always too shy” to write to them. Instead, she took a lead managing the player wiki – cataloguing information as the game progressed. Her personality at the time, she says, was “secret librarian”. 

 The puzzle cards – sold in packs – were how Mind Candy monetised the game. 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 cards were ranked from red (easy) to silver (hardest). Solving them earned points that would notch players up a leaderboard, but really the competition was with themselves. Besides, many of the puzzles required a collaborative effort. A year into the game, the Billion to One card (silver, naturally) was released. Hall heard about it through the player community but didn’t see it in print until a friend sent her one some time later. 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. The man in the photo is smiling, ever so slightly. One hint was provided: “My name is Satoshi”. Hall always believed it was possible to solve. “I had a feeling that it was more about the limitations of the internet,” she says.

 The early noughties, when alternate reality games (ARGs) emerged, were a tipping point for internet culture. Social media as we know it was just taking off (even if that meant splurging on Livejournal or making your Myspace page rain sparkles), Web 2.0 was gathering pace, and the world was becoming intricately networked. By encouraging players to co-ordinate remotely to solve complex problems, these games challenged the possibilities of a connected world, but the first ARGs were used for headline-grabbing “transmedia” marketing campaigns. The Beast – widely considered to be the first ARG, though the term did not yet exist – was an immersive murder mystery created to promote the film A.I. Artificial Intelligence in 2001. Much like the “mind-game” films of the era, such as The Game, Memento or Oldboy, ARGs toyed with multi-layered realities. “This is not a game” was a saying among players. Entry points were called “rabbit holes” and the writers were “puppet masters”. Combined with common themes of conspiracy, it’s hard not to view the moment as unsettlingly prophetic. In recent years, QAnon, a conspiracy theory in which a “puppet master” leaves cryptic messages on online forums, has been likened to ARGs. Adrian Hon, director of play at Mind Candy, who designed and produced Perplex City, recently wrote that the “parallels were striking”.