Winner of Perplex City tells his story

By Mark Frauenfelder at 1:19 pm Friday, Apr 20

Back in February, Andy Darley wrote about winning the first Perplex City alternate reality game. He also put a lot of photos on Flickr about going to the Rockingham Forest and finding the Receda Cube, worth $200,000.

It was then that I realised I was practically standing on a spot where the topsoil was the colour of the clay that ought to be hidden underneath it.

It wasn't 10m from the post, it was slightly further -- practically a continuation of the line I'd just investigated, exactly where you'd end up burying something if you walked 10m, stopped, and leaned forward to start digging. Seeing sub-surface clay with just a very thin covering of the material that was several inches thick elsewhere was deeply suspicious. If this wasn't the evidence for a hole that had been dug and then filled in, I didn't know what it was. I unpacked my trowel and cut straight down into it.

I'm trying to remember, and I think at this point I already knew I was onto something good, even before I'd gone very deep. It was the most promising spot I'd yet seen - it fitted the clues and it had good archaeology - and it had come at a moment when I was at a pretty low ebb. Six inches down, my trowel nicked something dark in the side wall of the hole that crackled when I prodded it. Just a couple of square millimeters of whatever it was, and at that point it behaved exactly like the tree root bark I'd been finding since Friday - it looked the same, and it made the same noises when poked. I cleared more of the sticky clay away from it with the tip of my trowel, and found that it was definitely plastic - not bark, but a bag. Plastic bags get buried for all sorts of reasons, usually accidental, so I refused to allow myself to believe it was the Cube. Nevertheless, I rocked back on my heels to take a photo. It's not a great photo, all blurry, but it turned out to be a pretty important photo - because moments later I cleared enough of the clay to run a gloved hand along the plastic and feel a hard, heavy, straight edge inside it.

That was when it hit me, that was when I knew I'd found the Cube.

Andy reports that he's received "lots of lovely messages from the others players, including most of the ones who came closest to winning. Most of the prize money is safely tucked away for a house purchase, but I also donated $8,000 to pay for a year's running costs for unFiction, and I bumped up the player-donated reward for helping find Satoshi to $1,000 (www.billion2one.org). Things have been fairly quiet apart from that - carrying on with freelance web design work and nursing my fledgling ecommerce site, www.mybathroomfinder.com." Link

Previously on Boing Boing:
• Perplex City
• More on Perplex City
• Fan song created for Perplex City
• Perplex City players need help to crack encryption
• Alternate reality games
• SF Weekly on Jane McGonigal
• Microsoft's new alternate reality game