“Let’s Put On a Flop!”: The Agony and the Ecstasy of Mystery Hunt 2012
Okay, so the title’s a little overwrought.
One of my favorite times of year is the MIT Mystery Hunt. It’s a weekend that allows me to completely indulge my geekiest tendencies, be entirely ridiculous, and spend vast amounts of time not sleeping. This year was no exception. For the second year in a row, Project Electric Mayhem graciously allowed me to help solve puzzles and run around campus with them. Were we anywhere close to winning? No. But it’s still an experience I won’t soon forget.
Unlike last year, I was there for the opening ceremony this time. As we all gathered in Building 7′s expansive lobby and awaited the start of things, I noticed people in suits milling about and arranging themselves near the large columns in the room. These had to be CODEX operatives, the winners of last year’s hunt preparing to start this year’s. Then another CODEX member, this time with an accordion, stood on a table near the projection screen and began to play a tune unfamiliar at first that quickly revealed itself as “Springtime for Hitler”. Only this time it was springtime for puzzlers at MIT. About midway through the song, I realized this wasn’t just a fun warmup for the hunt; it was the theme. We were going to help Max and Leo mount more musical bombs.
As for the hunt itself, I’ll just quietly direct you to the full archive of puzzles and let you wander around for yourself. The arrangement of puzzles was fairly genius and I loved the round names. We ended up only producing/performing one full musical for Borbonicus and Bodley, “A Circus Line”. By producing, I mean myself and another team member took time to stop puzzling, re-write the lyrics to “One” to include an elephant in a tutu and poor grammar (to irritate our critic as instructed by the metapuzzle), construct crude costumes (a red sequined jacket over my shirt/bowtie combo from earlier in the evening along with a black hat to make me a ringmaster, a paper cup-and duct tape elephant nose and ears along with a pink scarf around the waist for our elephant), and ACTUALLY PERFORM SAID NUMBER FOR AN AUDIENCE (of probably around 8 people and a video camera). There is visual proof of this, but I don’t plan on revealing it even if it does get released.
Other memorable moments:
- thinking I was going all interesting with my “cocktail” outfit to one of the events, only to find nearly everyone else in a bowtie (and multiple guys in prom dresses).
- going on a mission to take the T to MGH station and back to get my picture taken by a stranger for one of the puzzles
- running around MIT’s basement as part of one of the puzzles that took the form of a text adventure game