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The MIST2000 Treasure Hunt: Puzzle #4, explained!

OK, when you last saw us, unpacking this complex of computer stumpers, back on November 7th, we’d just unpacked the ANSI art black-on-black problem (with help from TheDraw fonts) and had been sent to puzzle number 4 by way of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, curiously: bit.ly/SopochtdasSchicksalandiePforte. And you were pointed to a .ZIP archive (a current compression standard at last, thank god!) FANTASTIC.ZIP (Fantastic Four, you dig?) which you then cracked open, only to be posed with this:

A password? No previous prompts provided me with any kind of password! This is unfair! But here’s a hint: the encrypted file’s name is “Horse Feathers”? Now, what comes up if you Google “Horse Feathers + password”? This isn’t rocket science, it was even the name of a movie. In fact, it’s the name of a trope: The Password Is Always Swordfish.

Maybe it would have been more fair to make it one of the classic overused passwords, like “password” or “God”. If I were to do this again, I probably would have styled the ANSI art clue as a fake BBS ad and listed this password as a New User Password. If I were to do this again… I’d be certifiably bonkers.

So you start playing the song, and you hear the creepy mantra repeated endlessly with an old interesting-failure word-by-word speech synthesis experiment: This is a red herring.

A “red herring”, for non-native English speakers, is a metaphor for a dead end of sorts – a distraction from an alternate fruitful avenue. And this song is full of them: open the file up in a tracker program and analyse the samples included in the song. One of them contains backmasked vocals – Satanic messages? No: sadly, an apology for being another red herring. One contains the old tracker trick of including a text file as a sample, and that text file will tell you everything you might have ever wanted to know about the etymology of the phrase “red herring”. A message in morse code? Sure. What you get when you decode the message? You can probably guess the species and colour of the fish. We even include one sample of noise that reveals a picture of a fish when run through a spectroscope… all different paths that lead to the same, unuseful, lack of progress. So how do we progress? What here is not a red herring?

In the first of my “no-puzzle puzzles” all you have to do here is play through the whole song, in its entirety, from within a tracker program that displays the names of the samples currently triggered. After listening to a great deal (well, a minute and 57 seconds) of creepy uselessnes, near the end of the playback, you will see a message silently display on the screen, assembled letter-by-letter, inspired by our longago insertion of ASCII stickmen dancing the YMCA in a tracked rendition of that Village People song for a Blender competition. And that message will tell you where to go. (And… where to go next, for puzzle number 5, is: bit.ly/fifthBeatle … maybe you can solve it before I get around to spoiling the puzzle, though for my sake I sure hope you don’t as I’ve really got to start dashing these off if I want to get MIST2000 into the public’s hands before New Year!)