Through the Looking Glass: The Story Behind
The Looking Glass Laboratories' Alternate Reality Game
[ <-- Previous ]

Puzzle #3: Rubik's Cube

Throughout its conception, we felt that this was a disaster waiting to happen, but would be really cool if it works so we had to try it.

Question: how does a computer engineer create a puzzle based on a Rubik's Cube without actually owning one?

Answer: re-create a Rubik's Cube in 3DStudio Max.


The cube in 3DStudio, including textures


The rendered "solve cube"


The "solve cube" peeled apart
We created a fully functional, solved Rubik's Cube in 3DStudio Max, then did the rotations (four sides clockwise) to get the end result, then built the key images based on the rendered end result. And, to ensure without a shadow of a doubt that the puzzle was correct, we cleared the textures on the rendered cube, applied them one by one to each of the 54 facets, and then reveresed the rotations.

When we originally planned this puzzle, we thought "how could anyone possibly solve this on paper?" So we decided to mail out actual Rubik's Cubes. We mailed nine of them in total, preferably to some of the most active Beta Testers that (a) were in the United States, and (b) actually put in an address on our registration form.

We had a surprisingly hard time finding one source to give us ten Rubik's Cubes (oh come on, you know we had to keep ONE), and by the time we ordered them and had them shipped, we were at the point in the game where we needed them out there and couldn't wait. So we Express mailed them to everybody, using an online postage calculator to determine the charge.

Unfortunately, since we used an automated service to do the postage and labeling, the actual cost of the shipment was not verified at the post office (they were simply dropped in the outbound mail). If we wrong in postage, we assumed the post office simply would not deliver it, but we were also hoping for a "law of averages": the important thing was that, even if eight of the cubes disappeared in to the post office black hole, all we needed is ONE cube to make it to destination.

What we did not expect is the post office to try to charge our players as if it were COD. When we found out that this was going on, we immediately stepped briefly out from behind the curtain and let two forum posters know that the objective has been met, all the packages are the same, and paying the extra postage for the package was entirely up to them.

We shipped out nine cubes. One arrived without excess postage, and we know of at least five that arrived with $3.25 additional postage due. The rest... disappeared in to ether, apparently.

And we were taking bets as to how long it would be before somebody cracked one open. Only in this realm would somebody receive a brand new toy in the mail, then proceed to fingerprint it, X-ray it, disassemble it, DNA test it, boil it, have their dog smell it, expose it to black light, etc...

As we quoted many times: "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."

Pseudo-puzzle: The Web Camera


JoshuaCam takes on GoDaddy
Prior to the web camera going live, we were doing modest traffic. In the days preceding it, ever since launch, we only did about 200Mb transfer from the server since launch, and averaged around 8K hits  day.

On the day the camera launched, we got 90K hits (that's over one every second) and did 800Mb in data transfer. IN ONE DAY.

We considered stepping from behind the curtain again and stating "please, don't do that!", but we decided to roll with it. The camera was originally not going to show any special images, and serve merely as a tool that Joshua either became dependent on or missed the absence of. When we say the players were desperately looking for something hidden there, we decided to make it worth their while. And, to be honest, it really helped the latter part of the game.

Puzzle #3: The Four Questions

We went back and forth with a variety of different questions. Originally what is going to be called Puzzle #4 was simply another set of one line questions linked to a simple image, but we figured we'd flex some more Photoshop (well, Fireworks anyway) muscle.

When the final four questions were completed, we actually thought that the hardest one of the four would be the first one, the reference to a Star Trek TOS episode. It, of course, was the first one solved.


One of the unseen images on the webcam: the cover to OSC's Ender's Shadow
This puzzle was the original purpose of JoshuaBot, but that was at a time when this question was much more complex and had many more questions in it. So, by the time it got refined, JoshuaBot was kind of a moot point. And, to be honest, JoshuaBot was a hell of a lot more trouble than it was worth. But, we promised and it was there after all, so with some final refinement we made it available, and it apparently helped to answer questions #3 and #4.

What the players apparently missed was that there were two new images in the webcam. One image showed the original cover of Orson Scott Card's Ender's Shadow (where the quote "Be the shoe" came from), and the second cover was a screenshot of the original Adventure (where "xyzzy" came from). They were there, unnoticed and ultimately unnecessary.

[ Next --> ]