Encyclopedia Brown is a series of books featuring the adventures of boy detective Leroy Brown, nicknamed "Encyclopedia" for his intelligence and range of knowledge. The series of 29 children's novels was written by Donald J. Sobol, with the first book published in 1963 and the last novel published posthumously in 2012. The Encyclopedia Brown series has spawned a comic strip, a TV series, and compilation books of puzzles and games.
The MIT Mystery Hunt is an annual puzzlehunt competition at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As one of the oldest and most complex puzzlehunts in the world, it attracts roughly 120 teams and 3,000 contestants annually in teams of 5 to 150 people. It has inspired similar competitions at Microsoft, Stanford University, Melbourne University, University of South Carolina, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and University of Aveiro (Portugal) as well as in the Seattle, San Francisco, Miami, Washington, D.C., Indianapolis and Columbus, Ohio metropolitan areas. Because the puzzle solutions require knowledge of esoteric and eclectic topics, the hunt is often fused with popular stereotypes of MIT students.
Concentration is an American television game show based on the children's memory game of the same name. Matching cards represented prizes that contestants could win. As matching pairs of cards were gradually removed from the board, it would slowly reveal elements of a rebus puzzle that contestants had to solve to win a match.
Swordquest is an unfinished series of video games produced by Atari, Inc. in the 1980s as part of a contest, consisting of three finished games, Earthworld, Fireworld, and Waterworld, and a planned fourth game, Airworld. Each of the games came with a comic book that explained the plot, as well as containing part of the solution to a major puzzle that had to be solved to win the contest, with a series of prizes on offer whose total value was $150,000. The series had its genesis as a possible sequel to Atari's groundbreaking 1979 title Adventure, but it developed mythology and system of play that was unique.
Masquerade is a picture book, written and illustrated by Kit Williams and published in August 1979, that sparked a treasure hunt by including concealed clues to the location of a jewelled golden hare that had been created and hidden somewhere in Britain by Williams. The book became the inspiration for a genre of books known today as armchair treasure hunts.
A scavenger hunt is a game in which the organizers prepare a list defining specific items, which the participants seek to gather or complete all items on the list, usually without purchasing them. Usually participants work in small teams, although the rules may allow individuals to participate. The goal is to be the first to complete the list or to complete the most items on that list. In variations of the game, players take photographs of listed items or be challenged to complete the tasks on the list in the most creative manner. A treasure hunt is another name for the game, but it may involve following a series of clues to find objects or a single prize in a particular order.
Paul Hoffman is the president and CEO of the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City, New Jersey. He is also a prominent author, science educator, food entrepreneur, and host of the PBS television series Great Minds of Science.
Money Hunt: The Mystery of the Missing Link was a 1984 contest video directed by David Hemmings and written by Gregory Ross. The video was a contest containing the clues necessary to solve a puzzle. The first person to solve the contest by calling a toll-free telephone number by the deadline would receive USD 100,000.
Perplex City was a long-term alternate reality game (ARG) presented by Mind Candy, a London-based development team. The first "season" of the game had players looking for "The Receda Cube", a priceless scientific and spiritual artifact to the people of a fictional metropolis known as "Perplex City", that had been stolen and buried somewhere on Earth. The game offered a real-life £100,000 reward to whoever found it. Like most alternate reality games, the story of Perplex City is told through blogs, puzzles, and other various media.
GAMES World Of Puzzles is a puzzle magazine formed from the merger of Games and World of Puzzles in October 2014.
The Microsoft Puzzlehunt is a quasi-annual Microsoft tradition started in 1999. It is a puzzlehunt in the same vein as the MIT Mystery Hunt and has some similarity to The Game. The hunt is a team puzzle competition which challenges each team to solve a large number of original puzzles of all different kinds. The answers, when used in conjunction with the metapuzzle, lead to a hidden treasure concealed somewhere on the Microsoft campus. Teams spend the weekend solving original and unique puzzles, usually created by the team that won the last hunt. Puzzles may be anything from traditional puzzles like crosswords, word searches, cryptograms, jigsaw puzzles, word play and logic problems to wandering around campus to find landmarks or puzzles that have to be solved on location. Microsoft Puzzlehunt was founded by Bruce Leban, along with Roy Leban and Gordon Dow.
Word ladder is a word game invented by Lewis Carroll. A word ladder puzzle begins with two words, and to solve the puzzle one must find a chain of other words to link the two, in which two adjacent words differ by one letter.
MAZE: Solve the World's Most Challenging Puzzle is a puzzle book written and illustrated by Christopher Manson. The book was originally published as part of a contest to win $10,000.
A treasure is a concentration of riches.
Steve Ryan is an American author who specializes in the creation of games and puzzles. Ryan is also a television game show historian and creator. Ryan was a long-standing staff member of Goodson-Todman Productions and Mark Goodson Productions, where he created the concept for the game show Blockbusters. Ryan also created the rebus puzzles for the game show Classic Concentration. He was also a writer and creator of puzzles for the game shows Body Language, Catch Phrase, Password Plus and Trivia Trap.
Puzzle contests are popular competitions in which the objective is to solve a puzzle within a given time limit, and to obtain the best possible score among all players.
The Merlin Mystery is a 1998 puzzle/children's book, written by Jonathan Gunson and illustrated by Gunson and Marten Coombe. Published by Warner Books and certified by Mensa, it served as an armchair treasure hunt book, challenging its readers to solve the titular mystery by deciphering the pictures to learn how to cast a magic spell, the details of which were to be drawn and sent to an official addess. None of the 30,000 entries received contained the correct solution, so the £75,000 prize was donated to the World Wildlife Fund.
On The Trail Of The Golden Owl is a French armchair treasure hunt book created by communications expert Régis Hauser under the pseudonym "Max Valentin" and illustrated by artist Michel Becker. The book was first published in 1993. It provides clues to the location of a buried statuette of an owl, created by Becker.
Paul Régis Hauser was a French writer and puzzle designer, famous as the creator of numerous treasure hunts, including On The Trail Of The Golden Owl, under the pseudonym Max Valentin.
Sheldon Renan is a writer. His first book, An Introduction To The American Underground Film, was published in America by Dutton in 1967. In England it was printed by Studio Vista (1968) as "The Underground film. An introduction to its development in America." It was the first book about underground film. He is a graduate of Yale University and a Rockefeller Grant recipient.
