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

I love puzzle hunts and escape rooms but I never got into ARGs. How do people find out about them? And are there any interesting ones going on right now?

This also reminded me of another long article on this topic but I can't find it again. Only thing I remember was that it had elaborate puzzle rooms filled with fancy practical effects that ate up a few millions in funding? It also had cult-like exclusivity and was invite only. Does anyone know what I am talking about? I am pretty sure I saw it on HN but it might've been a few years ago.

You’re probably thinking of the Latitude Society, by the creators of the Jejune Institute. Invites were given as blank white cards that would swipe you in at an anonymous building at an appointed time, kicking off the first part of the experience. https://nonchalance.com/latitude.html

There weren’t elaborate practical effects per se (there were some cool builds, like custom arcade cabinets) but many extremely talented experience designers worked on it so it felt very magical.

You might be thinking of this Latitude Society article: https://www.vice.com/en/article/xygykj/my-year-in-san-franci...

This was a wonderful read and captures the feelings associated with this so well.

I was only around 12 when I got my first pack free in my usual Focus science magazine, but was hooked from there. It even reached a fever pitch of me winning an auction on a discontinued silver card about relativity for around £80 but my parents wouldn't let me pay (I was very worried about my eBay rating for my account named something like TheCube1221).

The cards were beautifully designed—much bigger than regular cards you'd get in a blister pack, and had scratch off part to reveal the code you would type in to submit your answer to the leaderboard. And of course the edge of the silver ones was actually shiny. They didn't mention it in the article but the back of each card was part of the map of Perplex City!

The puzzles were all great for sparking interest in maths and logic. So many specific puzzles are firmly lodged in my head (the glasses of water one, the pirate treasure division one, the smell based one!, ...). I can still remember that album too, and actually one of my current favourite albums reminded me a bit of that Hesh records one when I originally heard it.

I'd also be lying if I said I didn't have some pangs of nostalgia for that old internet. Browsing websites that weren't in a constant state of flux, listening to the Postal Service, reading xkcd (which hasn't changed thankfully), and interacting in numerous custom built forums—each with their own distinctive flavour.

I'm not sure how possible something like this would be anymore, but hard to know how much to attribute to me getting older and losing some of that fog around the world (I remember my dad having to help me find a hidden link in a page by looking in the source code for "a" tags), and how much is the increase in power of the internet. Short of making codes verifiably difficult to crack (which isn't too fun for the average puzzler, and you can't do that for everything) it feels like if the internet can find a flag in the middle of nowhere from a nondescript feed of it, it could crack anything like this too fast to be fun.

It's very satisfying that Satoshi was found after all these years though, I remember spending a decent amount of time searching. There are probably some true completists among us though who have been fatally nerdsniped by the Riemann hypothesis card, and let's be fair—all the cards still haven't been solved yet!

Wait.

Explain your ‘Satoshi was found’ statement.