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Domestic | Feature

Feature: Perplex City: A Real-Life MMORPG

Feature by Thugpatrol | 11/14/2006 | 14:12:36 PM PST

This is where the cards come back into play, because many of the cards hold clues to the location of the cube. He shows me a relatively easy one where the solution is a phone number. Dial it and you get a recorded message sending you to a website which holds more clues.

Then he hands me another card with a word puzzle on it, but as I handle it I notice some of the letters are starting to disappear. Heat sensitive ink, he explains, one of many sneaky methods of embedding additional information in the cards. When I'm done mauling the card fully what's left is a password. To what, I have no idea, but this is my "Whoa!" moment. Something wild and crazy and somehow really cool is going on here, and I dying to see if they can pull it off.

In the months that followed that meeting I kept a careful eye on the world of Perplex City, and some very interesting things started to happen. Someone was killing off the cube thieves one by one, covering their own tracks, and a mysterious organization known as The Third Power was somehow at the heart of things. Not everything in Perplex City was as it seemed at first glance, and whispers of conspiracies were starting to spread online amongst the real world cube hunters. Carefully considering the sources of information and decisions on who to trust were clearly going to be important as things progressed. And then things started to get really crazy, with far too many plot twists to mention, each one accompanied by one devilish puzzle after another.

What has surprised me the most is the unity showed by the online community. Being a singularly cynical entity, I expected the siren's song of big money (no whammies) to polarize and isolate, but even now as things are coming to a head that has yet to happen. However with only a few cards left unsolved the cube seems closer than ever to being found, and who knows who's keeping what from whom in the hopes of coming out on top. On the other hand, Mind Candy has proven time and time again that the clever and the unexpected are their stock and trade. It remains to be seen what resources will be needed to seal the deal, and which burned bridges could cost someone their shot at the prize.

Even as this fantasy/reality drama reaches its final act, the epic saga of Perplex City has only just begun. A "season two" of the game is already waiting in the wings, and talk even of spinning off into other medium has started to circulate.

"I think there's definitely a lot of potential for Perplex City to make a big entry into videogames," says Adrian Hon, Mind Candy's Director of Play and Perplex City's Executive Producer, when pressed on the issue. "It's clear that people really value a good story and good puzzles from games like Sam and Max. Not only that, but consoles like the DS and Wii provide great opportunities to innovate.

"Obviously you can't replicate the full alternate reality game experience on a console. One of the reasons why ARGs are so much fun is because they use many different media-email, IM, websites, phone calls and so on. But there are some things consoles can do better. They provide a much friendlier interface, they're easier to get multiplayer working on, and they're a great way to deliver content. It's something we're looking at."