halloween havoc
all about the All Hallow's Eve contest

ok, so it wasn't quite LockJaw. hell, it wasn't even close. but it was a contest, and here is your complete story...

the concept and design

at the end of august, one of our designers came up with the idea to change guysguise.com and jadedmedia.net for the future. he thought it would be a good idea to start an ARG with gg.com and jm.net as the flagship sites. while we were quick to dismiss his ideas as alcohol-induced ramblings, he did put together a nice little game for us to play in the office. in a unanimous decision, we decided to go through with it. email was sent out, people were notified of a webpage. the ball was rolling

we needed a way to keep people enthralled until december, and we figured that there was no better way to do this than to offer two things that the ARG community loved -- puzzles and prizes. so, with little more than a moth or two fluttering around in our collective minds, we set off to design a puzzle based on four stages:

a) in the first stage, we would build on tactics used by one of our favorite sites, epscilon, and make some pages with clues built into them. this was an easy web page to web page chain.

b) the second stage was designed by our music reviewer jeremy kramer. he really wanted to use music as a part of the puzzle, so we let him loose. we were very pleased with his work.

c) in the third stage, we returned to an area we were already familiar with -- IRC chat rooms. we had already designed a previous puzzle around IC scripting, so this one was another fun one to put together.

d) the fourth stage was tricky to figure out, because we only wanted it to last an hour, but we wanted it to last the WHOLE hour. we finally decided to open up some forums on jadedmedia.net (which will remain for reader feedback) and use it's word censoring command to screw with the minds of the contestants. the end result of this was very entertaining.

someone had the bright idea that this puzzle might only take someone an hour or two, which is why we decided on the staggered timeline. while we now realize that this ended up frustrating some players (especially after stage 2), we thought it was the only fair way to involve everyone.

the winners and prizes

our winners ended up solving the final solve within a minute of each other. their screen names were:

grand prize winner: aveena
second place: teuqus
third place: carlitoxxi
fourth place: oliver
fifth place: imbri

all prize winners will be receiving custom jadedmedia.net t-shirts, and the grand prize is still a well guarded secret between jadedmedia and aveena.

some of the trail of the game can be found in the forums, while the entire behind-the-scenes look can be found at this link. while the puzzle was fun to design, it was even more fun for us to be directly involved on puzzle day. thanks to all of the players! we hope that this serves as good filler until the official re-launch of the sites.

james ingrahausen, contributing writer