Editing: The_GlobalTalk_Scavenger_Hunt_2025

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title:The #GlobalTalk Scavenger Hunt 2025
author:anonymous
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**Spoiler-Free introduction**

The #GlobalTalk Scavenger Hunt was a short game that was run on #GlobalTalk for #MARCHintosh 2025 by @kalleboo@bitbang.social. It started on Friday the 21st at 5 PM JST and was solved by the first contestant almost exactly 48 hours later.

The Scavenger Hunt was launched with 6 unique clues sent out to about 30 printers on GlobalTalk. The clues included some word games and some cryptic clues. There was also a single sentence with different words redacted on each print-out, requiring collaboration to find the answer.

**Clues**

As #MARCHintosh is still ongoing, **you can still try to solve the puzzle yourself** in your own time!

Here are the clues that were sent out, as compiled by @europlus@europlus.zone: (spoilers are hidden behind content warnings if you give up)

* [https://social.europlus.zone/@europlus/114210107453336066]{Clue 001}
* [https://social.europlus.zone/@europlus/114210117792367405]{Clue 010}
* [https://social.europlus.zone/@europlus/114210128705233604]{Clue 011}
* [https://social.europlus.zone/@europlus/114210144441693778]{Clue 100}
* [https://social.europlus.zone/@europlus/114210153515764752]{Clue 101}

**Spoilers / Answers**

[GlobalTalk Scavenger Hunt 2025 Answers] (plz somebody make this)

**Behind the Scenes / Port-mortem (Contains Spoilers)**

First of all - congratulations to everyone who won the fantastic prize! And thanks to anyone who participated, I hope you all had fun, even if you just completed one of the word puzzles on a printout!

The Scavenger hunt was a random idea I had when I was bedridden with a fever (you could call the whole thing a fever dream if you want). I was thinking about GlobalTalk, how fun it is to explore the little corners of it and what else you could you do with a big "LAN" like this aside from just printing and dropping text files. In a former life I worked as a developer for MacHeist (If anyone remembers that), which was a software bundle that would do online ARG-style teasers to drum up publicity, and I often remember how fun those were to do.

I came up with the idea when there was only about a week and change left before the end of MARCHintosh, and thanks to Murphy’s Law, March has been an absolutely crazy time for me, so I only allotted myself about a day's worth of time to prepare the whole thing, which is my excuse why the whole thing was so half-assed.

The first clues were just the first word puzzles that came to mind and had online generators.

I apologize for how dumb clue 2 was. I couldn't think of anything other than a word hunt for a puzzle and it was hard to shoehorn a clue in there... Although in retrospect making really dumb clues makes them harder in some way, since everyone over-analyses them. It was really interesting to see people bring LACS into the game, even though that has never crossed my mind! If the game had stalled for longer I totally would have dropped a hint on there. Very funny to see that it was the game that actually got people to install it!

As for the 5th clue, I definitely wanted a clue where you had to actually go hunting on GlobalTalk shares, but that’s kind of fraught with danger the the whole network is fragile - not everyone sees every zone, someone’s router may die, etc. So I made up a clue where there were multiple correct answers (I put the Joker stack in every available S-zone dropbox) to hedge my bets. After all the word puzzles it took a while for people to realize this wasn’t just another one of those.

The 6th clue with the puzzle pieces was a last-minute addition, and I had prepared alternative printouts without it in case I couldn’t find enough online shares with custom icons on launch day (more of y’all need to customize your shares!). I made the puzzle pieces chonky enough that even if a share or two was down you should be able to make out the word. For some reason also I spent half an hour making sure the icons themselves were readable and you could put the puzzle together with just the icons in the Finder...

[https://kalleboo.com/linked/gtsh-prep_folder.png]{Screenshot of the clue prep folder}

There were a couple things I definitely wasted some time overthinking:

In my pessimistic mind there were two possible outcomes - either everything was too easy and would all get solved in one hour, or nobody was interested and it would just ended up being ignored. Although as long as more time was collectively wasted trying to figure out the answer then I spent making it, I’d count it was a win!

I spent a lot of time worrying about the timing - GlobalTalk being so… global… means that people of all time zones are on it, and if all the action happens right when it launches then it means half the network wakes up and never even had a chance. I tried to time the launch of the prints in order to give everyone a chance, and in the end I’m really pleased by how it all unfolded time-wise. It went slowly enough that people of all time zones had an opportunity to participate.

[https://kalleboo.com/linked/gtsh-printing.jpg]{Screenshot of printing the first round}

In addition to the timing of the prints I also kept overthinking the order I sent them out - I looked up the #GlobalTalk hashtag to figure out who was posting photos of their printouts on social media, so among that subset I planned who got what clue so that at least one copy of each clue would be posted publicly so everyone could see all the clues, and no clues would go lost on some social media lurkers.

[https://kalleboo.com/linked/gtsh-printlist.jpg]{The list of prints in progress}

I was also unreasonably paranoid about people unlocking the win screen out of the final entry stack (since HyperCard is completely open source), so I went through the trouble of tracing the winning image (from Microsoft Office 98 clipart) (half-assedly in 30 seconds) into line coordinates in HyperCard ([https://kalleboo.com/linked/gtsh-prize_vectors.png]{this is the draw list if anyone is curious}), and made the server send that list over to a script in the stack that would draw them on-demand during a winning condition. This way there is no cheating possible! I also went as far as deprecating the old GlobalTalk Chat clients since they used HyperCard’s native RPC networking which is completely unsecured and could have been used to extract the answer from the server remotely.

I hadn’t planned to make it anonymous, and did nothing to cover my tracks - I just wanted the focus to be on the game instead of me, so I avoided plastering "THE GLOBAL TALK GAME BY KARL HOSTED ON BARONET POWERED BY DR PEPPER ZERO CALORIE” over it, and in the end I guess it added a bit to the mystery - it was funny watching people discuss looking at printer logs and speculate on who created it.

My only regret is not having enough free time to extend the hunt - until someone solved it, I could always have added words to the end (or beginning) of the phrase and sent out more clues to keep it going until the end of March. But sadly I had no time.

Also it was SO HARD not to drop hints! I kept telling myself “ok I’ll drop a hint on this at midnight to unblock them” but then someone made another small breakthough and I decided to put it off for another half day, and that kept repeating. In the end no help was needed.

**Hopefully now that this idea is out there, someone with more creativity and planning can do something really awesome next year!!** If you're interested, please get in touch as I as the game unfolded I kept getting ideas for ways to make it more interactive, social, real-time etc that would just need another few days of development to add, so with planning it could totally be done.

P.S. This whole blog post was written on an eMate 300 (on a single charge of the original battery, mostly with the backlight on)

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