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The MIST2000 Treasure Hunt: Puzzle #9, explained!

This is it. I’ve held your hand through every contentious piece of show-stopping material along this path, standing between you, the avid vintage computer art enthusiast, and me, the gatekeeper of the jam-packed MIST2000 archive. If you had any aspiration to figure out any of the treasure hunt’s puzzles, this is the last unspoiled territory for you to try your hand at – the final speed bump.

So here we go. bit.ly/planesofHell brought you to a web page, joker.html – the group name “Mistigris” carries a few meanings, but despite the early emphasis on “a variation of poker in which the joker is wild”, largely we ended up celebrating the “French for alleycat” interpretation instead. But here we have a couple of vintage Mist jokers harrassing you, because … not everything here is entirely as it seems. It is the final puzzle – again, not much of one, but a little drag factor at least. Both ANSIs depict jester heads and – is that a clock around the neck of the first one? Mid-‘90s Menace, Flava Flav is a hype man, not a jester.

Now, where were we? Oh yes, there’s the link – you click it, and … what? 404? Is nothing in this accursed world as straightforward as it pretends to be? (OK, an invalid complaint: this has all along pretended nothing less than to be a puzzle.) There are no hints on the 404 page. It really does want you to go back. (If I’d been in a crueller mood, I would have made the 404 page’s link redirect to a different “joker” page that looked the same and whose URL read the same – some lowercase-“l” / numeral “1” / capital-“I” ambiguity perhaps – whose “step across the finish line” link was now valid. But that would have been cruel. The finish line was, it turns out, right in front of you all along: it was just, as in puzzle #3, hiding in plain sight. Hit Ctrl-A or whatever your system understands to invoke the “Select All” command, and marvel in amazement as additional text is revealed beneath the bogus hyperlink:

There are no lines in nature, only areas of colour, one against another. – Edouard Manet
__________

(I bet that’s probably the only time Edouard Manet has ever been referenced in artscene history! But it’s a nice quote, seemingly applicable to ANSI art – perhaps a mantra for practitioners of pHUNK.)

Anyhow: THAT line of underscores is the “finish line” described above. Anyhow, if it is clicked upon, the computer user will skip to the very end of the merry chase and see the eye-bleeding congratulatory extravaganza you never earned, on which we blew our entire VFX budget. (Also, next time you run The Secret of Monkey Island in SCUMMVM, try “Ctrl-W” to Win the Game. It will bring with it a parallel thrill.) It really is worth seeing, words will only take you so far, but before you go here, you need to have been given a Pokemon epileptic seizure warning. Warning! OK, now go knock yourselves out.

That’s it! No more puzzles! Go home already!

The MIST2000 Treasure Hunt: Puzzle #8, explained!

OK, so you jumped through the hoops. bit.ly/spiderlegs delivered you a file, isenough.rar, which contained a very brief text file that just read “examine not the contents but the container”, plus some SAUCE metadata, fingering this file as: the contents. Finally, an actual puzzle! It’s not much of one, but it requires you to do a little more than sit, wait and watch.

In a perfect world, you scrutinize the .RAR archive itself (“the container”) for the SAUCE with which it has been invisibly enriched using SPOON – but in a pinch, you can just open it in a text editor and take a peek seeking out text strings at the end. Here, so close to the end, it sends you further along, to bit.ly/planesofHell. Could the end of our epic quest be within reach? Very nearly so, I think!

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The MIST2000 Treasure Hunt: Puzzle #6, explained!

This puzzle doesn’t require mastery of any of the classic artforms of the underground computer artscene, though implementing it demanded a fluency with the same hexediting that would have been called for were I trying to crack or train a piece of fresh warez. But I get ahead of myself. Puzzle #5, recently explored, pointed us to bit.ly/degreesofbeanwithbacon … and there we found, yea, the very archive of Commander Keen 4: Secret of the Oracle that we could have expected. (Not quite the very archive, mind you – most of you remember the game in EGA, but for bonus nostalgia, I tweaked the CGA-only version.) But this installation is not “stock”: while most of the files are the untampered originals, some of what you will find here bears fingerprints more recent than John Romero and Tom Hall’s.

Much to my dismay, I was unable to re-ICE the tweaked game state back to the ID standard “needs to be De-ICEd first” distribution format, adding one more to my list of “obscure forgotten file compression formats revived for the MIST2000 treasure hunt” candidates, but those are fine points tangential to their function for passing along codes to explorers.

So where is the new business? You can begin where any search on a BBS would begin, perusing the archive’s FILE_ID.DIZ:

You’re doing well, now take a break!
Relax so you won’t make mistakes.
Try a round of Commander Keen 4!
Don’t worry about achieving the highest score.

OK, that tells us… everything we need to know, but let’s fire up the program just to make sure.

Yup, it’s Commander Keen 4. Are explorers expected to achieve a position on the high score table? Well, no: that would require 10 000 points, which would be time diverted from my precious treasure hunt (on a probably more fun endeavour; you might simply fail to return!) So play a bit (or not; sitting through a couple levels’ demonstrations will also get you there – so yes, this is another puzzle that can be solved by patiently sitting through on autopilot after being set into motion), but when you’re done, do take a look at the conspicuously-mentioned high scores table. Hey, it at the top of the list there that our next code resides! Also, some elite greets.

This method of embedding a secret message was, incidentally, first imagined way back in the conception of the BBS treasure hunt that was the ~1991 seed for how this puzzle series would ultimately unfold. The technique for embedding arbitrary text (well, within tight string limits) was explored (I was always fascinated by the literary implications of the protagonists of Altered Beast brawling with the credits roll upon completion of the Genesis cart – hm, my childhood memories appear to have overstated the case) in preliminary experiments for my incomplete, unreleased machinima WIP for MIST1014 – you can see a poem hiding here:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibRMhd3y_OE&w=480&h=360]

But I digress. We now have everything we require in order to progress to puzzle #7, located at bit.ly/pillarsofwisdom without a shred of pretentiousness.

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The MIST2000 Treasure Hunt: Puzzle #5, explained!

So, here we are. We’ve breezed through the puzzles in the textmode artforms of lit, ANSI and ASCII, and have even blitzed through tracker music, which brings us to puzzle #5 in the MIST2000 treasure hunt: nightsatFreddies.zoo located at bit.ly/fifthBeatle, containing aeiou.rip

.RIP? That’s right, it’s a piece of RIPscrip artwork, that vector graphics format intended for use on BBSes and never really embraced by them either. This one is a no-puzzle puzzle as well: it writes where to go next directly on the screen. Then, it writes it again. It writes it over and over again, until the sheer texture of all the layers of the instructions renders any one of them unreadable – and (unless you opt to throttle the display speed to that of a slower simulated modem) it displays them so quickly (and the message itself is sufficiently strange) that you will be unlikely to interpret it on-the-fly. Tauntingly, it concludes with a message: palimpsest? Yes, since the heyday of the artscene, we also have taken 100-level art history courses in college. If only you could scrape beneath the layers of extraneous verbiage and restore the simple statement of this puzzle’s clue…

Well, there is another way: because the message was input as plain text (vs. vector instructions for drawing specific outlines that coincidentally spelled out letters quite a bit more slowly), the clue is spelled out … quite a few times … in the .RIP file’s data, laid open for any text editor to enjoy:

!|10000$SBAROFF$|1K|*|W00|=00000001|c0F|Y01000A00|@071Gdegrees|@E31Qo
f|@0543bean|@8Z4Dwith|@3Y67bacon|Y04000A00|@0016degrees|@E31Lof
!|Y04010A00|@1EJM33bean|@6636with|@B61Gbacon|Y07000A00|@031Bdegrees
!|@DK1Gof|@0648bean|@8Z4Kwith|@3W66bacon|Y03000A00|@002Hdegrees|@EA1Bo
f|@0240bean|@924Iwith|@3464bacon|Y08000A00|@0212degrees|@E313of|@003Wb
ean|@8Y48with|@2W5Sbacon|Y0A000900|@020Pdegrees|Y0A010900|@CN2Cof
!|Y0A010700|@1EJG37bean|@6P3Qwith|@EA1Pbacon|Y00000A00|@012Edegrees
!|@274Cof bean|@016Ewith|@6L7Dbacon|@252Cdegrees|@004Bof bean|@8D60wit
h|@037Fbacon|Y0A000A00|@0103degre|Y0A000800|@000Ydegrees|@2H3Cdegrees
!|@041Eof bean|@AN3Cwith|@7U5Abacon|Y0A010600|@1EJQ0Jdegrees|@180Tof b
ean|@3G2Ewith|@5Y2Abacon|Y00000600|@0024degrees of|@0442bean with
!|@005Qbacon|@4624degrees of|@5O42bean with|@AU60bacon|@3W5Qdegrees of
!|@046Ubean with|@0K7Ybacon|@466Adegrees of|@5O74bean with|@AU88bacon
!|c04|Y05000A00|@0Q3Epalimpsest?|#|#|#

“degrees of bean with bacon”? Some bizarre conflation of Six Degrees of Separation (or our favorite variant, Mistigris of Separation) and Commander Keen’s Bean-With-Bacon Megarocket? Well, yes. So, off the puzzler must go, to bit.ly/degreesofbeanwithbacon!

The MIST2000 Treasure Hunt: Puzzle #3, explained!

All right, folks; clearly everyone who was going to solve the MIST2000 treasure hunt on their own has already done so. Foolishly I’d thought that it would spur interest in the then-upcoming MIST1015 but it looks like we might have done better by going the other way around. Oh well, we may as well unpack the rest of these puzzles in short order so that archive can also enjoy public wide release as well.

When last we visited this treasure hunt, we had been directed by Bubble Bobble letters in ASCII to go to bit.ly/omnetriumperfectum , yielding trois.lzh, which when opened contains luddyvan.ans. And what do you see when you load up that piece of ANSI art?

Having already gone the uncoloured route in the previous ASCII art puzzle, you’d think I could have thrown in a splash of pigment here, but apparently not. Apologies for the misleading opening quote; it had a way of misleading people who investigated the hint, which, when itself viewed, looks similar:

“Now you see it, now you don’t.” Why couldn’t I have chosen a phrase that elegant and unambiguous? Both images clearly present frames in which something should be visible, but what and where? What we have here are the artscene’s first and second artworks substantially relying upon the quirk of ANSI colouration known as “black on black”, 20 years apart, where individual character cells on the screen are assigned both a foreground colour of 0 (black) and a background colour of 0 (black). This trick was not infrequently used to conceal greets, artist credits, and other hidden messages in an ANSI picture – I have a vivid memory of stipulating text for illustrator Eerie to hide in my poem “I am Elite” released in MIST1294. There are a few techniques for revealing black-on-black characters. The puzzle’s first winner brute-forced it in a powerful text editor, removing all ANSI colour codes. The intended solution involved cycling in some classic ANSI viewer software like ACiDview or GoldView from colour mode to grey mode to ASCII mode, when it is revealed. Another approach could involve using a block or brush recolouring tool in an ANSI editor such as Pablo and assigning new, visible, foreground colours to whatever was contained there.

Happyfish> This is hilarious, I can see in text file that there are line segments presumably spelling something out; AcidView just renders it as a featureless grey block in monochrome mode. FAIL
This is my punishment for not downloading pablo. OFF I GO

Applied to Mage’s earlier piece, that resulted in the following appearance:

… and here’s where my alleged cleverness came to bite me in the bippy: everyone who got to this puzzle thought that the hint was the name of the character in the hidden ANSI (character is what you are in the dark, and there’s the character in the dark, right?) – but no one knew what his name was. (No, I don’t, either.) I intended only to indicate that the same technique was called for on my minimalistic greyscale ANSI, which when properly massaged would reveal the following message in ugly TheDraw ANSI fonts, one of the few allowing mixed letter-case use for the message to appear in correctly-capitalized German:

“So pocht das Schicksal an die Pforte”: Destiny knocks on the door. (You know what it describes, even if you’ve never heard the phrase before: the four notes opening Beethoven’s 5th Symphony – da da da DUMMMNH!) And that, there, is the next stop in the treasure hunt: bit.ly/SopochtdasSchicksalandiePforte

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.