How about a nice game of Tag?
Since we know not everyone has access to an Xbox 360 for Bungie Day, Roger thought it would be cool to run a Bungie.net contest for Recon. If you were planning on spending the rest of the day wallowing in your own terrible misery while everyone else jumped into Halo 3’s Matchmaking for their shot at Recon, it’s time to dry those tears and get focused - iIt’s puzzle time.
Roger as "Outermage." Costume design: K. Thaler
Here’s the details, straight from the Wolf himself:
Hi everyone,
It's Bungie Day, and I feel like handing out some Recon. So let me tell you a story...
There's a cool event that happens every year or so at Microsoft called
Puzzlehunt. Teams of a dozen, many of whom work at Microsoft, spend an entire weekend without sleep solving puzzles created by that year's hosts, fitting into a theme. Two years ago (when we were still at Microsoft), the team hosting Puzzlehunt 11 invited me to join them in writing game-themed puzzles. How could I resist coding a puzzle into the stats result of a made-up game of Halo 2? What's more, the guys at RvB were about to stop by for an early look at Halo 3, so I whipped up a quick script and asked if they'd perform and record it. They were happy to, and it became the intro to this puzzle.
The puzzle been sitting, hidden, on Bungie.net for almost two years since then, so just for fun, we'll let you take a crack at it for a chance to win Recon. Be warned: it's not at all easy, since it's meant to be a challenge to the types of people in and around Microsoft who spend a weekend each year solving puzzles for 36 hours straight. But it is solvable, since most of the teams got it.
Keep reading to see how you can get Recon.
The theme for this Puzzlehunt was Tron - teams were zapped into the computer by an evil program, and had to solve puzzles to do battle with him, and eventually escape with the help of friendly video game programs they'd meet along the way. This video introduced the Halo puzzle:
Red vs. Blue: How About a Nice Game of Tag?
Players were then directed to
this page, which is the puzzle itself. You don't need to navigate away from this page to solve it. Just click the links that change what you see in the main image.
Want to play for recon? We've set up a Bungie.net account to receive your answer. Simply send a Bungie.net private message to
this user with your answer as the subject. The answer is a single word. We'll search through the PMs and give Recon to the first five correct answers who we deem to be provided by legitimate solvers (so don't write a script to submit a word list! And we'll check for answers automatically, so be sure to spell correctly.) We’ll also pull a couple of random users with the correct answer out of the pile too, so if you don’t get it right away, keep at it until you have it solved.
Employees of Bungie or Microsoft, participants in Puzzlehunt 11, or others who have had similar exposure to the correct answer, are not eligible. Players who post the puzzle answer to our public forums, share it via PM, or otherwise distribute the answer will be banned from both winning Recon and from Bungie.net. Plus, they’ll only be hurting their own chances by adding more players to the random drawing. Oh, and there's a discussion thread attached to this article. Please use it.
Happy Hunting.