Megahard, Bay Area, September 30-October 1, 2000
On July 30, 2000, Megahard Corporation announced its impending release
of "Doors 2000". CEO Gil Bates denied rumors that Doors 2000 was
filled with bugs, but as we found out on Game weekend, there were more
than a few bugs remaining. Megahard was hosted by Red 5, all two of
them.
Team Advil was veterans John Owens, Scott Pegg, and Alex Aravanis as well as
newcomers Derek
DeBusschere (who drove the WHOLE weekend), Ed Boyden and Mike Malkin. Advil
corporate headquarters was kind enough to give us a big box of Advil
as well as Advil flags (blurry, on the
right). We started on Parking Structure 2 on the Stanford campus,
wearing rainbow wigs.
The plot focused on teams as software developers, attempting to fix
the various bugs in Doors 2000 before its release. Each clue was
accompanied by a floppy disk describing a bug and its patch (which was
then applied to our Doors 2000 executable. I had quite a stack of
disks by the end of the weekend.
We started with a crossword puzzle in a corporate packet. Some squares
needed to be filled in with HOLE (as in HOLEinone), which we then cut
out; the paper underneath gave an IP address with a Java-based web
clue. We then went to a Menlo Park hardware store, up to Woodside,
back down to find a VCR to play our clue, up to the summit again (a
cassette tape which was spooled backwards), and back down towards the
coast. Alex found a clue in a cave right before the tide came in. We
were fully in the dark (and in the main pack) when we got to a
semaphore-based rolling-ball puzzle, but as we headed back north again
on Highway 9, we started picking up ground.
As dawn broke we were at Vasona Dam in Los Gatos, in a small pack way
behind the world-beating Doh Boys. (They had taken to writing their
time of arrival on their calling cards, leading to depression in our
van.) We went north to the salt ponds in Fremont and east to a train
trestle in Niles Canyon, where an etiquette clue blasted us forward.
One of my favorite clues was in Pleasanton, a bunch of stamps, sorted
in batches by denomination and by year within a batch, with circular
postmarks as dots and wavy ones as dots ... certainly one of the most
elegant puzzles I've seen in any Game. We continued north from there
with an animal-sound cryptogram and a paint-trinary puzzle at Sherwin
Williams. Our big score was in Moraga, Derek's hometown, on a
country-flags puzzle which we zipped through quickly. We reached the
Joaquin Miller Abbey in Oakland a little before the Doh Boys and
didn't look back. A Braille clue there and a submerged pipe (bug:
"Broken Pipe") at the San Leandro Marina led us to the Krispy Kreme
store in Union City. They were DELIGHTED to see us as they had a donut
assortment all prepared for us. It led back to Atherton and a
first-place finish (and the successful release of Doors 2000).
[ Random pictures from the Game weekend
| Mystic Fish's
more complete wrapup
]
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