Introducing the fabulous MIST2000.ZIP treasure hunt!

All right, you miserable wretches! I’ve been unleashing mounds of collections of lost, previously-unreleased, and downright new computer art from the underground PC art scene for the past year! I’ve been exhausting long-fermenting stockpiles of the stuff, discharging it all out into the uncaring air of history, and I’m through! By which I mean… we have one final collection of classics for you to enjoy, MIST2000.ZIP (subsequently referred to as M2K for brevity’s sake), a digest of materials optimistically collected ~1997-2001 for eventual artpack release before I’d come to the conclusion that my artgroup Mistigris had really and truly died for the forseeable future. (Happily proven kind of wrong: like Banishment in Master of Magic, you can come back – but you have to wait a heck of a lot of turns to do so.)

But unlike all of those prior offerings from the vault, I’m not going to deliver it to your front door on a silver platter. I made this whole process too easy, pathetically offering the unplucked flower of our youth up with no shred of coyness, tainted with the whiff of desperation surrounding something well past its prime. And why, after all, debase yourself by accepting what was so needily proffered? It’s not last call, and you have no obligation to take our art home with you just because it wants to live on your hard drive!

Now, as Louis C.K. says, everything’s amazing and nobody’s happy. But think back to the artscene’s eyeblink in the limelight of technological relevance. In order to procure an artpack, there were so many steps you had to undertake: first you needed a computer (expensive and far from ubiquitous) and a modem, and some understanding of what the latter could be used for; you needed an ANSI-supporting terminal program you had to figure out how to use without tapping into any kind of online assistance, and BBS phone numbers, enough of them that you could slip through the surface layer of Public Domain systems to some underground boards; you needed to obtain access to said underground boards by gleaning enough elite insight from bubbles up to the PD sphere to pass review by the new user application committee. Then when you called back, you had to wait in line for the busy signal to resolve. Finally you reconnected, and found you needed to build up your file points by sending in something that you had that they wanted and didn’t have yet, a catch-22 if ever there was one. After several uploads, you finally accrued enough file points to download your desired artpack – but the board hung up on you for running out of your daily allotment of time! You called back the next day and found that you didn’t actually have enough daily minutes needed to download the file, so you banked that day’s remaining allotment and called back on day THREE, at which point you withdrew the extra minutes and successfully initiated the download at 1200 baud – which tied up your computer and your phone line for one hour and 82 seconds. By some stroke of luck your mom didn’t pick up the phone extension for the whole hour, and at the end you had an archive on your 40 meg hard drive ready to be cracked open. Well, first you had to delete some files to make room for the archive to be uncompressed… then you had to wait for them to decompress… and there, finally you had the files there on your hard drive, ready to enjoy. Only – you didn’t have enough RAM to load ANSI.SYS in your overloaded CONFIG.SYS file, so you couldn’t view the files from the MS-DOS prompt, and you needed to wait until the next day to download an ANSI viewer from the BBS. And then you managed to do so, and then you basked in the warm glow of getting to enjoy subjecting yourself to advertisements for long distance bulletin boards you could never afford to be able to call, even if the ads didn’t blank out their actual phone numbers. Hopefully you enjoyed the art, because you weren’t getting those file points back, or that time, or your ephemeral youth…

THIS SYSTEM WAS, QUITE FRANKLY, INSANE. (It brings to mind my high school valedictorian’s observation that between your mother’s lifetime egg production and your father’s lifetime sperm production, simply by being conceived by a combination of those particular two gametes you had beat odds of two hundred trillion one hundred billion to one.) But by making itself impossible, it compelled us to up our game, to better ourselves and harden ourselves to handle the impossible as just another everyday curve ball to be hit out of the park. We would do three impossible things before breakfast and then queue a batch of four more to process automatically while we were at school! We became efficiency ninja, and like perpetuators of cruel hazing practices, carried on the elite practices because we believed that it really separated the wheat from the chaff – and if nothing else, it guaranteed that everyone in the artscene that you interacted with felt keenly passionately about being there… because it had taken so many steps to get there, and they’d be damned if they didn’t get some return on their investment. Everything gained by working under such conditions felt more rewarding as if earned through hard work, because it was hard work… unpaid work that no one asked to be done, but labour nonetheless that required a rare specialist skillset, focus and dedication.

Today, by contrast, we invite you to click a link for instant gratification – and you may or may not be arsed to lift that proverbial finger.

So maybe it turns out that people are more interested in something that they have to sweat a little over in order to obtain. It just so happens that I’ve had a bug in my ear to creatively add inefficiency to a simple process for quite a while – predating my involvement in the artscene, I sketched out plans for a PD BBS treasure hunt, inspired by Kit Williams’ 1979 puzzle-book Masquerade, by way of Bamber Gascoigne’s account of the mania in the 1983 book “Quest for the Golden Hare”. I thought it would be a good premise for a “grand tour” through the BBS scene, encouraging people to visit specialist boards beyond their particular online community and comfort zone, but when the SysOps balked at coughing up $5 a piece for a $100 grand prize to the winner in exchange for a failsafe plan for the free traffic guaranteed a mandatory stop along the route, my aspiration stalled and I resolved to find less elaborate ways to express myself.

Ever since then this idea has rattled around in my head as the good idea that “got away”, a funny bone tickled when I encountered David Münnich’s 2004 NotPron, Aaron Reed’s 2009 blueful, and Ernest Cline’s 2011 book READY PLAYER ONE. I don’t have many treasures to give away – no golden hares, not even a $100 pot… but I do have this amazing time capsule what is M2K, so why not make you more interested in it by being a tease and throttling your access to it a little bit for a little while?

So there we go, that’s all the setup. How do you play this contest? What is the structure of the puzzle? I’m not going to spill it all here at this moment in time, but I will assert that to overcome the gauntlet you will need to demonstrate a handy mastery of oldschool artscene lore across all its mediums – challenges that might take a guru 5 minutes (like Myst, if you know what you’re doing), or a luser … forever! Because we feel passionately about supporting the economy of the beleagured country of Libya, all puzzles take the form of a redirected (or perhaps I should say usefully obfuscated) bit.ly URL leading to the next step of the puzzle, where the case-sensitive (and no spaces or punctuation marks) answer “YourCodeHere” to a given puzzle would fit in the form http://bit.ly/YourCodeHere . Every few days, we will be rolling back and “spoiling” early puzzles in the sequence to enable stymied truthseekers to proceed further in our nefarious chain of stumpers. And by the end of the month the M2K pack will be released to the public directly; this is your chance to enjoy nearly a month of exclusive access to our archive in exchange for your ineffable eliteness.

If you feel that there has been a malfunction or that a puzzle piece is not working fairly, as it should be intended to, please don’t hesitate to contact us (@mistfunk, cthulu at tabnet dot ca) to bring the matter to our attention. It should work, but it is not inconceivable that something we didn’t think of might be temporarily getting in the way.

On that optimistic note – you can find the first clue over here. Happy hunting!

GOT STUCK? Read through and skip directly to the second puzzle!

STILL STUCK ON THE SECOND PUZZLE? Follow up here and proceed to the third!

Alternately, forget the third puzzle, we spoiled that one for your convenience as well!

QUITE SOME TIME LATER, WE SPOILED THE FOURTH PUZZLE as well, allowing latecomers to this game to breeze through the gentler second half of our insidious riddle-clues.

Also, in short order, the fifth puzzle also was spoiled.

In keeping with the theme of the week, we went on to spoil the sixth puzzle the following day, though really, there was hardly any puzzling there to do.

Much the same could be said for the seventh puzzle.

And then there was the eighth, and finally, the ninth and final puzzle, all spoiled for your entertainment and edification. Now you can just go forth and enjoy the MIST2000.ZIP artpack without any interference.