Perplex City facts for kids
Perplex City was a super cool online game called an alternate reality game (ARG). It was made by a company in London called Mind Candy. In the first part of the game, players had to find "The Receda Cube," often just called "The Cube." This Cube was a super important scientific and spiritual item for the people of a made-up city called "Perplex City." It had been stolen and hidden somewhere on Earth!
The game offered a huge real-life prize of £100,000 (that's about $130,000 or €115,000) to whoever found The Cube. Just like most alternate reality games, the story of Perplex City was told through online blogs, fun puzzles, and other cool ways.
The game started in April 2005. A player named Andy Darley from the UK won it! He found The Cube in a forest area in Northamptonshire, UK, on February 2, 2007.
Mind Candy had planned to release new cards for a second season of the game, called Perplex City Stories, on March 1, 2007. But in June 2007, they announced that the second season was put on hold for a long time.
Contents
What is Perplex City?
The City Itself
Perplex City is a huge, made-up city that has some mysterious connections to Earth. It feels like a city from the near future, with really advanced mobile phones, special medicines that help your brain, and skyscrapers that are super tall, like a kilometer high! Life in Perplex City is also a bit more perfect than what we usually see on Earth.
The most important thing about their culture is how much they love puzzles and thinking games. Their biggest competition, called the Academy Games, is all about brainpower, not physical strength. Almost every part of their culture involves riddles and mind challenges.
Their beliefs are mostly about building, construction, and technology, not about gods. The Cube is always seen as a very special and holy object. It has many unusual powers that many people believe are magical.
Who Lives in Perplex City?
Some important people in Perplex City include Sente Kiteway. He was the head of The Academy, which is a top learning place in the city, and he used to look after The Cube. His two daughters, Scarlett and Violet, often talked to people on Earth through their online blogs.
Pietro Salk was a reporter for a big newspaper called The Sentinel. He found many clues before he was sadly removed from the story for getting too close to the truth. The team at the Academy, who were trying to get The Cube back (and who made the puzzle cards), also kept in touch. Kurt McAllister was another important friend to players on Earth.
The Story of Perplex City
The Stolen Cube
A special item called the Receda Cube was stolen from the Perplex City Academy and somehow ended up on Earth. A team called the Cube Retrieval Team (CRT) was formed to find it. Since people from Perplex City couldn't travel to Earth, Sente Kiteway, the head of the Academy, asked people on Earth for help. He promised to share any clues he or the CRT found.
The person who stole The Cube was known only as Combed Thunderclap. They would leave clues about where The Cube was hidden. Players soon found out that another group called the Third Power and a group that worshipped The Cube, called the Reconstructionists, were also looking for it.
Finding the Truth
While people on Earth searched for The Cube, several citizens of Perplex City, especially Kurt McAllister and Sente's daughters, Scarlett and Violet, tried to find more clues in Perplex City. They also wanted to figure out who Combed Thunderclap was.
Kurt, Scarlett, and Violet discovered the lab where The Cube was made. They learned that Sente had built The Cube, and it could be used as a weapon or even to teleport things! Finally, people on Earth found The Cube in Northamptonshire, England. They also discovered that it was Violet who had stolen The Cube and hidden it on Earth. She did this to keep it safe from the Third Power.
Puzzle Cards
Collectible Puzzles
Mind Candy sold a series of puzzle cards that you could collect. They came in booster packs, with each pack having six random cards out of 256 possible cards. The cards were grouped into sets and had different levels of how rare or how hard they were.
Unlike other card games like Magic: The Gathering or Pokémon, these cards weren't for fighting against other players. Instead, each card had a different puzzle. The rarer cards had harder riddles. Each card had a special code you could type into the Perplex City website. This earned you points and a spot on a leaderboard, showing how well you were doing! Many cards had hidden features, like special ink that showed up under ultraviolet light or changed with heat. The puzzles covered many topics, from pop culture facts to secret codes and logic brainteasers.
Each card was part of a four-card set. If a player solved all four cards in a set, they got double points for each card!
Famous Cards
- Riemann (Card #238): This card seemed to ask players to solve a very famous math problem called the Riemann hypothesis. But the Perplex City website couldn't actually check if someone solved such a hard math problem. So, it was probably not the real solution. This is still the only unsolved card!
- Billion to One (Card #256): This card showed a man's face with Japanese writing that said "Find Me." His picture was shared on social media to try and find him. The card was solved in December 2020 when the man was found! He explained that he was supposed to ask the actual puzzle question to whoever found him. But he forgot the question! So, the puzzle maker later posted a recording of the question online. The question was "Who died after giving birth to flames?" The answer was Izanami.
Cards No Longer Printed
Two cards are no longer made. They were removed from later printings because they didn't fit the printing layout. Even though these issues have been fixed, Mind Candy doesn't plan to make or print these cards again. They are:
- Card #238 (Riemann): This card was removed because it was almost impossible to solve.
- Card #245 (Relativity): This card was removed mostly by chance, but it was also a very complex problem to solve.
How the Game Was Played
The puzzle cards were meant to introduce players to the characters and story of Perplex City and the bigger mystery of The Cube theft. Clues on the cards would send players to different websites, blogs, emails, phone calls, and text messages that seemed to come from Perplex City. These often had their own puzzles, and solving them led to even more puzzles. Players often had to work together to reach different goals.
Perplex City ran for a long time, starting in late 2004. This was much longer than most alternate reality games. Because it lasted so long, many cool things happened that wouldn't be possible in a shorter game. For example:
- Players wrote a whole book to help a character become a "published author" and get access to important old records.
- A full music CD with mysterious techno songs was released by a musician from Perplex City.
- A plane flew across Manchester with a special word on a banner. This word let players into a new part of the game.
- Sixty players went to a real-life event in London to search for clues. But then, one of the players was revealed to be a secret agent and escaped in a black helicopter!
- 220 people took part in the first Perplex City Academy Games in London. This was a high-tech scavenger hunt all over the city. A month later, a similar event happened in New York.
Perplex City Board Game
In late 2006, Mind Candy released a board game called Perplex City: The Board Game. In this game, players solve word puzzles, logic problems, picture puzzles, and trivia questions to collect colored stones. Players can also challenge each other to win their collected stones. To win, you have to collect the very last stone by challenging another player.
The rules of the board game were written as if they came from the world of Perplex City. They gave background about the puzzle-loving citizens and a made-up history of the board game itself.
About Mind Candy
The Perplex City cards from Mind Candy were first sold in a few special stores around the world. But later, they became easier to find in many stores, both online and in person. On September 7, 2006, Mind Candy announced that GameStop would start selling Perplex City cards in 700 stores across the United States. As of September 26, 2006, over 682,425 cards had been marked as solved on the Perplex City leaderboard, with 45,215 players signed up.
Mind Candy received about $3 million in funding from a company called Index Ventures. This company also invested in other tech companies like Skype.
In June 2007, Mind Candy announced that they would put the second season of Perplex City on hold for a very long time. Mind Candy later focused on their Moshi Monsters games, and the Perplex City project was stopped.
