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 Forum index » Archive » Archive: General » GAME: Vanishing Point
[PUZZLE] [SOLVED] Las Vegas/Bellagio Puzzles [Jan 8]
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rowan
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Joined: 12 Apr 2004
Posts: 1966

 		Cuckoos from the neowin thread:

Spoiler (Rollover to View):
Cuckoos looks like something to do with a Windows OS build number and version. 51 0026100 2866

The Las Vegas video has the two missing coccoos in it, they are 3 and 7. If you input those, earth coordinates are shown: 51°30'02.61"N 0°07'28.66W - Big Ben in London. Thus, the solution to Cuckoos is "Big Ben".

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PostPosted: Tue Jan 09, 2007 12:36 am
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Raiden47
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Joined: 23 Apr 2005
Posts: 108
Location: yay - Colony - 35296154

 		Calender
Calender Answer
Spoiler (Rollover to View):

Answer to Calender was
interrobang
Not sure how it was found, will have to ask around.

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PostPosted: Tue Jan 09, 2007 1:22 am
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CreativeEmbassy
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Joined: 12 Jan 2005
Posts: 145
Location: State College, Pa, USA

 		Calendar
Calendar

You'll need the video for this one, skip to about 3:18 in.

Spoiler (Rollover to View):
Loki mentions calendars, and starts reciting the months June, January, April, March, May, and February. These months correspond with the numbers on the crumpled sheet of paper to the right of the calendar. All of the numbers are to be filled in, so fill in the 3rd, the 10th, and the 24th for June, and so on.

Now, each of the calendar months have certain dates on them, and each one matches up with another month, much like a puzzle. However, May and June connect in 3D to April and February, which forms a cube.

And this is what we came up with. (Thanks thebruce!) If you actually take the time to make that (or you're just a genius like strifey), you find a questionmark and an exclamation point drawn on it.

!?

The Answer is INTERROBANG

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PostPosted: Tue Jan 09, 2007 1:31 am
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griffy12
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 		Did anyone
Did anyone actually go on this form. And if so how was it I bet it was the most wonderful sight ever in the world. Beings that I am stuck on the east coast I dont for see me going to any of theses event even though it would be nice. Hold one in New York or Pennsylvania or somewhere around PA and I might go. But I cant jump on a plane and go any where far. It sucks I know. Crying or Very sad

PostPosted: Tue Jan 09, 2007 1:46 am
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rowan
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Joined: 12 Apr 2004
Posts: 1966

 		Repair Table (solve mostly by strifey when he was supposed to be going to bed)

Spoiler (Rollover to View):
First things first - You have to notice the blinking :s. They are blinking in morse and spell out "MORSE IS THE KEY, NOW USE IT"

Then, you have to get a series of numbers from the video:
101 dalmations, 76 trombones, 3 blind mice, 8 ball, route 66, jack of spades for 21, and 9 lives of a cat

Now you have to add |s and -s to make the numbers. For example, for 101 you have to add a vertical line { | } and then two horizontal lines { - } to get the clock to read 101. This is where you use the morse. The |s are dots, -s are dashes.

.-- W
.-. R
.. I
-. N
-.- K
.-.. L
. E

Spells out wrinkle

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PostPosted: Tue Jan 09, 2007 2:05 am
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freshness
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 		Starfield
Spoiler (Rollover to View):
The video showed the time 3:15 in a star, and that was the first entry in the book. From there, the "hour" numbers were coded into CONNECT THE MINUTES (A=1, B=2, ...). Using the "minute" number as a direction (15=E, 30=S, 45=W, 60=N), and taking a few liberties with the numbers in the middle, the connected shape looks just like the state of Washington. WASHINGTON it is.




PostPosted: Tue Jan 09, 2007 2:46 am
Last edited by freshness on Tue Jan 09, 2007 2:47 am; edited 1 time in total
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konamouse
Official uF Dietitian


Joined: 02 Dec 2002
Posts: 8010
Location: My own alternate reality

 		Talk with Elan
Wow! Adrenaline rush and fun to see live. We stayed for the second version (after they fixed the projection on the left side where it was a little fuzzy).

I spent some time tonight talking with Elan (from 42).

They are definitely monitoring what is posted on the boards (but we knew that). They had no control over who got the puzzle boxes nor the silver envelopes. That was all under MS control, not 42.

42 was responsible for all the puzzles. In fact, I have a picture of our puzzle masters.

EVERYTHING has a clue. The *only* mistake was the appearance of the gaffer in the doorway in the first video.

The building in the second video? That is the office of EDOC Laundry Cool

Speaking of the second video. The music is from a band "Concord". Their first album will be released this year and they will be playing at the special event (for over 21) after the live event in Seattle.

At all the live events there will be a projection of some sort with the video clues. After a reasonable interval, that same video will be available on the game website.

No, they would not give me any insider info, no answers, no clues, no hints. Nothing is timed. You have all the time in the world to get the answers to each 12 puzzles. The only "timed" puzzle would be the meta one. And that can't be fully solved until the last live event (Seattle). There may be something familiar in that meta puzzle (as in an ARGish flavor). It's gonna be deep. That's all he could share.

Hope you enjoyed it. I wonder if I'll show up on any of the PR film that MS did (you never know what makes the final cut).
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PostPosted: Tue Jan 09, 2007 3:44 am
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Sylvia
I Have No Life

Joined: 21 Apr 2006
Posts: 2062

 		Dean Takahashi reports on Vanishing Point and Konamouse
http://www.mercextra.com/blogs/takahashi/

Quote:
Why Did Holly "konamouse" Go To The Bellagio?

By Dean Takahashi
Tuesday, January 9th, 2007 at 1:31 am in General.

There's some strange behavior going on here at the Consumer Electronics Show. It started when a woman appeared at the keynote speech of Bill Gates on Sunday night. She was an attractive woman who looked like an actress with glasses and long, brown hair.

Then, during Gates' speech, one of his aides, Justin Hutchinson, was demonstrating the usefulness of Windows Vista. He was ostensibly showing a feature of Vista that allows you to preview a thumbnail picture of a file before opening it. But the file was a description of the "Fountain Show Planning" and it mentioned the name Loki in a headline.

And finally, today at 630 pm and every hour afterward, a bizarre light show took over the fountain. There was a crowd of 200 people, with several TV cameras and some journalists. In the middle the Faith Hill song, "This Kiss," the famous Bellagio water fountains stopped working. A bell rang. "It's time," said a female voice. Then the fountains shot into the air again and light projectors painted the face of a woman on the water spouts. The woman who was with Gates, who called herself Loki, said, "Listen carefully."

Then Holly "konamouse" of a group called Unfiction took note. A Las Vegas dietician, Holly had come to this spot to hear this message. She was on a cell phone telling another member of her group what was going on. She soaked it all in and spoke quickly.

What was going on? Read on.

The watery image of Loki said that a series of puzzles and clues would appear in the light show. I watched as a series of images, codes, ciphers, and puzzles flashed before me. I could make no sense of it. "Everyone knows the color of money," Loki said. There were pictures of all sorts of clocks with crazy numbers onn them. There was a black-and-white picture of an old guy who looked like Walt Disney with the year "1946″ on it. Loki narrated. The show close with another strange clock clue. And she told the crowd to visit www.vanishingpointgame.com

Then the fountains picked up with the "This Kiss" song again as if nothing happened. The crowd dispersed, but I stuck around and conducted some interviews with some very familiar faces. I, of course, and some other journalists were in on the event. Microsoft's PR folks had told me to go to it. It was a promotion for Windows Vista, but not the kind that blares out the Microsoft logo or the Windows brand. This was an "alternate realilty game," and it was created by the people in the picture on my game blog, www.mercextra.com/gaming. Holly was one of the fans who was participating in a "Wiki" style quest to solve all the puzzles with the cooperative help of everyone in her Unfiction group and the entire "hive mind" of the Internet.

Pictured there on my game blog are a dozen or so folks of 42 (4orty2wo) Entertainment, a viral marketing agency based in both Emeryville and Seattle. The company is the brainchild of Jordan Weisman, the former Microsoft game developer and creative genius behind the BattleTech fighting mech franchise, the WizKids games for children series, and some other things.

I've run into Weisman a number of times over the years. I wrote about him in my Xbox 360 book because 42's team was behind the "ilovebees" viral marketing campaign that Microsoft used to stoke millions of fans to get excited about the launch of Halo 2 in 2004. That game was the best-selling Xbox title ever, and the ilovebees campaign won a series of awards for its innovations in meshing various kinds of media with Internet. One of the hallmarks of ilovebees was that 42's folks figured out how to make 50,000 pay phones ring at the exact same time. Fans recorded the calls and pieced together a six-hour broadcast that talked about the invasion of Earth by the Covenant, part of the Halo storyline. Weisman's team figured out that "games are like oxygen." You can take the idea of solving puzzles in video games and insert them into any media, including the Internet and the real world. Hence, the term "alternate reality game."

The executive producer of this Vanishing Point game is Susan Bonds, who I saw tonight and who reminded me that I met her years ago while she was working at Cyan on a game code-named Parable that turned into Uru. She knew the Bellagio fountain creators at Wet Design because she had worked with them at Disney. She got them to consider creating a one-time spectacular light show that kicked off the Vanishing Point promotion.

The whole 42 team got involved in this project. They were approached a year ago by Aaron (sorry the name escapes me) and Brian Moriarty, a couple of Microsoft marketers who wanted to create excitement around the launch of Windows Vista. Advanced Micro Devices joined in the campaign. J.B. Williams, head of the Vista launch, said that the company is hoping to reward the biggest fans of Vista with the campaign, which will cost in the millions. Williams said that only six people at Microsoft — and not Bill Gates — know all the details of the campaign. The ARG, he said, balances the commercialism of the campaign with the fun of a game with a story line that has very little to do with direct brand promotions.

Bonds' team came up with its idea and decided to do something more ambitious than getting 50,000 pay phones to ring at the same time. In the past year, the creative geniuses at 42 released a Pirates of the Caribbean Dead Man's Chest instant messenger game that attracted 4 million fans. They also released an interactive mystery diary, Cathy's Book, with Internet linkages. It hit the New York Times Best Seller list. And Lee's own sister company, eDoc Laundry, created a line of T-shirts and other fashion that had secret messages on them. If you solve the mysteries, you can watch 35 different video segments that reveal a story about a band member accused of murder. The shirts were the heart of a CSI: New York TV episode. Lee said this thing is going to be bigger than anything the company worked on before.

Lee said that the team created a whole fiction around Loki that the fans would unravel. The 42 team built the story and then broke it into 1,000 pieces in the form of clues that it scattered around the Internet and in the real world such as the Bellagio event. It kicked off in December when Microsoft sent 90 Ferrari laptops with Windows Vista to journalists and bloggers. (The New York Times noted how Microsoft made a gift of the laptops that some saw as a bribe).

The laptops came with a Chinese puzzle box that included a USB flash drive. Plugging in the flash drive, the recipients saw the first video of Loki. For weeks, fans at Cloudmakers and Unfiction have been solving puzzle after to puzzle. One clue told them to come to the Bellagio fountains at 630 pm Monday, where some journalists and TV crews were waiting alongside most of the 42 team.

The winner of the game is going to get a rocket ride into space for the "ultimate vista." RocketPlane, a company in Oklahoma City, will launch private-passenger rockets into space starting in the third quarter of 2009, said George French, a salesman at RocketPlane whose executives include former astronaut John Harrington. Harrington said he was excited about giving a space ride, which costs about $250,000.

While it's a contest and a promotion, it's also an ARG, says Lee. Weisman says that games aren't necessarily restricted to traditional platforms. "Games are like oxygen," he told me when I wrote about him in my book. They are a mechanic for entertaining people, but they can uses any mediumm — including a water fountain.

"Vanishing Point is a puzzle challenged designed to challenge players to find hints, clues and puzzles online and in the real world," Lee said. "The reward is a trip into space. This character Loki is another challenge." The one who solves the mystery of her will get his or her name etched into the silicon of every single AMD Athlon FX chip that gets made through March.


I corrected an error. vanishingpointgame.com was vanishingpoint.com.

PostPosted: Tue Jan 09, 2007 7:21 am
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Minkette
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Joined: 30 Aug 2006
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Location: London

 		Sundial video clue
rowan wrote:
Sundial: (solved with partial solution)

You're supposed to take the times mentioned in the video, then - - - - - - - -. I only saw 5 times mentioned, but the answer is 6 letters.


In the fountain video there is a clue with 6 times surrounded by a sun. it's 3.13 minutes in, I think all the video clues have pictorial hints as to which online clue they correspond, certainly the gears one does.
I know you've already figured out all the answers but I just thought I say.
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PostPosted: Tue Jan 09, 2007 8:02 am
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Ehsan
Entrenched

Joined: 09 May 2003
Posts: 992

 		 
With everything practically over for this stage, allow me to sneak in a rant:


Quote:
While it's a contest and a promotion, it's also an ARG, says Lee.


No, it isn't.


Assuming that...
- The above quote is correct
- The game elements will not drastically change
...it hurts me to see someone I hold in such high regard when it comes to ARGs miss the point. VPG is nothing more than a puzzle game with a little meta story element added in. With every iteration of 42 games, the Beast model slips slowly into oblivion.

I'm playing VPG and liking it. I admit I'll end up enjoying the experience and having a great time. I understand the design constraints, and the necessity of cashing in on viral elements and creating sweepstakes to satisfy the marketing machine.

But, maybe for next time, how about a game which focuses on a complex story and characters, not puzzles. How about game with 99% online elements, not real world interactive graveyard romps. How about a game with a curtain so tight that nobody plays just because it's from 42, but because it's a magical experience.

That would be a good game.

PostPosted: Tue Jan 09, 2007 9:36 am
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aliendial
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Location: Far Far Away. Nowhere Near You. Really.

 		I don't think they feel bound by our attempts to define what they do. They just do it.
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PostPosted: Tue Jan 09, 2007 9:44 am
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krystyn
I Never Tire of My Own Voice


Joined: 26 Sep 2002
Posts: 3651
Location: Is not Chicago

 		Personally, I feel this is a puzzle trail with ARGish elements, but if it gets the genre more recognition and credibility, I'm not gonna complain.

Maybe it's time for another META thread! Woot!

Thanks again to RedHatty for phone duty (it's exciting and a bit nerve-wracking to relay information to an eager IRC channel!), and for the channel ops for encouraging a great group atmosphere last night. For a first-event-with-new-game, there was very little pain. Wink

btw, these puzzles look beautiful.
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PostPosted: Tue Jan 09, 2007 10:18 am
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Minkette
Boot


Joined: 30 Aug 2006
Posts: 43
Location: London
Ehsan wrote:
With everything practically over for this stage, allow me to sneak in a rant:


Quote:
While it's a contest and a promotion, it's also an ARG, says Lee.


No, it isn't. ...
... VPG is nothing more than a puzzle game with a little meta story element added in.


Is it not a little early to judge that? (ever the optamist) when I read Loki say that she has a side project with a seperate prize, I interperated that as 'there will be an ARG hidden in this puzzle game'. Give it a little more time to see if this turns out to have a sub-story (or if I'm just seeing shapes in the clouds...)

also,

Ehsan wrote:
... How about game with 99% online elements, not real world interactive graveyard romps. ...
That would be a good game.


IMO If you take all the real world interaction out of an ARG its just a computer game. In the same way, if you only have live events you got yourself a LARP. The exciting thing about ARGs is that they slightly overlap ubiquitous reality.

n.b.
Is anyone else having trouble with the puzzles solving properly? on gears I've solved it 5 times (there are 2 possible solutions btw!) but the main page still says 'unsolved'.
The pocket watches one doesn't give me the second half of the puzzle - so I can't solve it.
calendars and repair table both give me 'OTHER' when I type in the answers. please PM me if you can offer advice!!
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PostPosted: Tue Jan 09, 2007 10:52 am
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Jenna
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Joined: 07 May 2006
Posts: 416
Location: Romford

 		I was beginning to think that this was a puzzle game, nothing more.

But then when the new message said;
Quote:
When I was hired to build the Vanishing Point, I realized it was an opportunity to build something personal that I've been trying to find a way to build for many years now, and that if players were smart enough to get through the puzzle suites, they might also be smart enough to help me with this.

So let's see if you can help.


I believe this is the ARG element. Obviously, if this was just a puzzle trail, we'd be sitting around for the next week to continue. Instead, we're looking for a way to contact Loki.

Just my thoughts.

EDIT: Just realised Minkette said exactly the same thing. Oops Embarassed

Never too old for a trout :p
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PostPosted: Tue Jan 09, 2007 11:18 am
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konamouse
Official uF Dietitian


Joined: 02 Dec 2002
Posts: 8010
Location: My own alternate reality
Ehsan wrote:
With everything practically over for this stage, allow me to sneak in a rant:

Quote:
While it's a contest and a promotion, it's also an ARG, says Lee.


No, it isn't.


Elan said that we (unfiction) will recognize the ARGish quality for the META puzzle.
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PostPosted: Tue Jan 09, 2007 12:28 pm
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