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[aliendial]

Thanks, Rowan!

(FYI my method would have worked too, had I only realized I was going for one big number and not six numbers...)

Still hoping for an explanation of 10 . . .

[Omnie]

Quick explanation of 10:

[danman_d]

[Shad0]

[Justin_Case]

[vpisteve]

I feel it only fair to comment on a few things. First off, congrats to all who finished and followed along. Because of the feedback I've gotten, I'm really thinking about making this an annual event (hear that, pms?)

It was also great to see some great old puzzles come out of retirement. Very natsukashii. Ahem, anyway, here's the breakdown of the puzzles and solutions:

Puzzle 1: A knockoff of the chemistry puzzle in The Beast. Didn't want things to start off too difficult, and this puzzle was great, as it was a small taste of what is was like to stumble onto the very first puzzle in the very first ARG. I used license plates instead of chemical compounds. I almost used flags of various countries to make it a little U.S.-centric, but the flags looked too stupid. The translation is "so it began," and the puzzle solution led to salla.html.

Puzzle 2: A tribute to the Nocars puzzles in Lockjaw. This puzzle gave the trail its very first blooper, as, despite having been proofed by numerous people, an incorrect station was highlighted. Mistakenly, we had highlighted Wimbledon thinking it was Richmond, as the original solution was 'converse.' Once the mistake was discovered, we had to scramble to get a renamed page up that matched the new station, somehow. Result: evencows. Sigh. We got the new page up before it had been tried, so no harm, no foul. I hope. Sorry guys!

Puzzle 3: Evencows.html led to our wonderful tribute to plexata (whose page is still online), one of my fav's. The base-4 solution led to obtain.html, which contained the new and improved widet. Scott Rossi very kindly updated his widget to work on newer operating systems, and changed the entry key to 45912, which was a tribute to how Lockjaw was launched (message 45912 on the Y! Cloudmaker Group). Once again, what i thought was a straightforward math problem resulting in 45912 was error strewn, and I take full responsibility for that one. So, the original equation was replaced with something a lot easier. Hey, I'm a musician, not a mathmatician.

The ultimate solution led to karyotypes, which was what those DNA strands were.

Puzzle 4: The urchins return with a paintoveresque picture, which holds the following clues to the solution, which is an online location. The background of the hands on the TV pointed toward the film Poltergeist, and the phrase "They're heeeeere," to let you know that the directory location was 'here' at argn.com. Then the same methodology as before to find the correct directory, which was /thrust with a login of malvolio/innerdolphin.

Puzzle 5: We brought scratch from MU back for this one, and he was very cooperative. His hints pointed to push: Pushup, pushpin, pushover, and finally, "Push the button, Max." Extra points to those of you who placed that quote from The Great Race.

Puzzle 6: The Acheron ID tag was deceptively more difficult than I thought it was gonna be. Sometimes it's good to hide things in plain sight. The hidden button led to unlesteve.html, which was just Bill's warped sense of humore.

Puzzle 7: Ah, Jamesi, pie and zooming in. What could be better than.....oh, never mind. Those of you who know jamesi and played JMX had no trouble solving this one.

Puzzle 8: Sparkplug. Again, no clue where jamesi pulled that out from, as it had no deeper meaning, at least not that I know of. This led to what I affectionately referred to as Dave's Momentum Killer Puzzle. As so often happens when building puzzles, sometimes ones that you think will be tough are solved in minutes, while ones that you think will be relatively easy will live in the annals of ARG frustration history. While I hadn't been planning on cluing any puzzle, it was apparent that something needed to be done, as there was no progress for over 12 hours, and I'd been hoping for the trail to be a weekend's diversion. Anyway, kudos to Dave for being more eeevil than we ever thought, but succumbing and providing those clues that were posted over the following day. I'm not even going to attempt to explain the solve here, you'll just have to read it back up in the thread for yourself.

9: The Teddy puzzle was the sentimental favorite, at least as far as I was concerned. If you didn't play The Beast, you missed out on an annoying series of puzzles that featured Eliza and Teddy. (Oooh, I remember how long it took that flash to load back in 2001 on dialup). Dan Carver was great enough to do a whole new puzzle just for us, and it was great. So good to see Teddy again. The solution "ding dong Eliza is dead" led to the final puzzle.

10: Son of where.gif! Derek Jensen, who created the original where.gif puzzle for Lockjaw, gave us a new, not quite so difficult, puzzle this time around. I told him that this one had to at least be solveable! And it was, as many of you made it to the final, ultimate solve page at ninehundredninetynine.html.

The ultimate solve was a take-off of the ultimate solve puzzle for Push, NV. Regrettably, this solve didn't result in a million-dollar prize, but hey. This was pretty much exactly the same, except the Push solve resulted in a phone number, and I wanted to keep things inclusive for those not in the U.S. The email addres, boxcarmask, was simply all I could come up with by using the different letters in the various games. We had two winners right away, then a big pause, then a rash of a lot more, then things trickled down through the next couple days.

Anyway, there it is, for what it's worth. Hope you enjoyed it, and I look forward to doing something similar next year. Or maybe better. Who knows.

Oh, and what did you think about offering a prize? Did the sudden competitiveness make it more fun or more frustrating?

[aliendial]

Fun fun fun. WAY fun.

Until endgame and everybody clammed up.

That's the prize effect. So keep the prize nominal but memorable so no bruised feelings no matter who gets to the final solve first.