Game on! I'm offering up one of my one-man-show, inside-a-Disney-park games, in which teams compete by solving puzzles and racing around the park. I've done this before— several times— under different titles for the competition. The new one is called "Magic Pursuit." And you are all hereby invited to play along on April 10… for FREE. More details below.
First, a little background. Our story rightly begins in 1980 with a Disney movie named Midnight Madness, which apparently featured puzzles and a car rally. I say "apparently" because I never saw it, but my friends must have seen it, because in the late 1980s my friends and I staged a Midnight Madness of our own for our extended network of high school friends, based on the same format of puzzles leading to new locations, where more puzzles awaited. So I was familiar with the concept early on.
Remember?
Around the same time, Disneyland (where I worked) held its own car rally for Cast Members, sending teams all around Anaheim in something called the Great Goofy Pursuit. I didn't play it, and I don't even remember why not at this point, but I now wish that I had. By the time I had a team willing to jump in, the event morphed from a car rally to a different kind of event happening just inside Disneyland alone.
It was called Minnie's Moonlit Madness (a clear homage in the name to Midnight Madness), and its first year was 1990. Teams of exactly four players were bungee-corded together, with unclipping only allowed for restroom breaks. The game took place after hours, when the park was essentially deserted except for the players and a small army of volunteer staffers. It started with some multiple-choice trivia, then led to individual puzzles, doled out one at a time. Each puzzle, once deciphered, led to a location in Disneyland, where we had to hunt for a detail (I remember things like "What does the manhole in front of Pirates of the Caribbean say?")
Sometimes when we got to the location described there was a person there forcing teams to perform some manner of interaction, like singing a song or skipping together, to get the final answer. It was amusingly humiliating; I both loved and hated that part. Once you had the final answer, your team headed back to the Central Plaza, where you would find your table by team number and get issued a new puzzle. And so on until the end of the night. The winners were chosen by total number of points (puzzles had different "weights") and also by how quickly they finished.
Would you remember all the details of these images without going on the ride again?
That first year, we managed to come in fourth place, a feat I'm still proud of to this day. Though of course, I would be prouder still had I actually won. The event grew after that first year, and when Cap Cities/ABC joined the Disney family and thousands of new participants flooded in, suddenly competition was way too intense—we never got close again.
That didn't stop me from having fun. One year, I was with a different team, and we were so exuberant, we dressed up in costume. Specifically, we dressed like the rock/pop band Devo, complete with yellow "power suits" and red "power dome" hats (think of the nerds' outfits at the talent competition in the Revenge of the Nerds movie and you'll have the basic idea). It was gloriously geeky. Worse, we called attention to ourselves throughout the night by chanting "Are We Not Men?" "We are Devo!" in a kind of übergeek marching cadence. You can thank our team's ringleader for the chant; I was aghast at all the attention at first but came to embrace the craziness. It occurs to me that some of you readers might know this ringleader, who worked with me at Disneyland. It was none other than Robb Alvey, owner/webmaster of Theme Park Review. And if you've ever seen Robb's roller-coaster videos, you know how zany and outgoing he is there; so imagine him at the age of 18!
It burns my cheeks now to imagine how geeky and annoying we must have been, but the enthusiasm must have also been contagious, because unknown teams around us starting chanting with us whenever we passed them by. And best of all, someone at Disney had captured some video footage of us cavorting around, and I saw to my amusement/ horror/ pride that they used the footage for years after that, whenever they were showing the Minnie's Moonlit Madness event on Cast Member television.
It was Jeff R. who indirectly helped me realize that simple amateurs could stage such a competition themselves. Jeff was a Working Lead at the underground eatery in New Orleans Square—it was then called the DEC (Disneyland Employee Cafeteria), but was formerly known as the (Racing) Pit and later as the Westside Diner. I don't remember much about what Jeff put together, but I did copy him in using the same "obscure" sign from his game in a later game of my own (for the record, it was the faded sign about "getting a good friend" in a shed near the Fantasyland/Big Thunder Trail border). Though I don't think I ever had a chance to tell Jeff that he had inspired me, his model gave me the idea a few years later to try doing this myself.
Quick—What do all the switches say on them?
That opportunity came in the late 1990s. By that point, I had been an active participant in the early online fan community revolving around Disneyland. Specifically, I had been posting in the Usenet (think discussion boards) group called alt.disney.disneyland, and it was common for posters there to refer to the group as ADD. So I called my game ADD-Quest, and invited everyone to come play. Many of the posters in ADD gathered weekly at Disneyland already, just to say hello and share in our common interest in the park.
In that atmosphere I created ADD-Quest, trying my best to stump and entertain my online friends. The stars had lined up to make me want to take this on: I'd helped make such a game in high school, I'd almost finished in the top three while playing the official Disney version, and I'd seen an example from Jeff of how to do it by myself. I modeled the first game after Minnie's Moonlit Madness: there was trivia, there were puzzles (everything from ciphers to foreign languages), and there were directions to visit corners of the park and locate obscure details.
ADD-Quest was successful enough to warrant a second one, and by the time the third one rolled around, our little online community had undergone a transformation. Many of us had created websites about Disneyland (often using AOL or geocities to host them), and we decided to band together and form a mega-website to be called MousePlanet. Since I was a founding member, I brought over my little game and renamed it MouseAdventure. The game expanded rapidly. I began to encourage teams to dress up in coordinated outfits; that helped engender some team spirit and also made the event as a whole more festive. This idea, of course, was merely an echo of my experience as a "member" of Devo for one night!
I continued to write MouseAdventure for several seasons, and now there was a growing staff to help with the immense coordination needed. One of my last games there saw the introduction of a new format: the MadScramble, which was not point-based like all previous games. Instead, this was a pure race. But you couldn't advance to the next station unless you finished the puzzle/quest at the CURRENT station, so it wasn't a physical contest alone.
I moved to the East Coast after that and I started up with games on my own again, this time in Orlando. The games were called UltimateOrlando Challenges. We made it through several iterations, and it was great to see some returning faces each time. The event didn't really grow, though, and anyway I wanted to take a breather for a bit. I did stay involved in games, however, such as writing the East Coast version of the popular Gumball Rally, our MiceChat-sponsored event that favors pure speed over puzzles and scavenging, with participants jumping on an impossible number of rides all in one day.
The Muppet area is brimming with details, most of them far too trivial to commit to memory.
That brings us to the present. I've had time to breathe and I'm ready to try again for a combination puzzle game like I've hosted before. The advent of Facebook in the interim made it a snap to let people other than me actually do the choosing of a park and a date for the event (I polled my Facebook friends, many of whom I've never met in person, and I went with the simple majority). Here are the details:
Date: Epcot on April 10, from 2pm-5pm.
Cost: Free! [Now I'm sure that photocopying packets will lose me a little money, but this time around I'm willing to swallow the cost myself and keep the event free anyway (in future years I may wish to at least cover my costs, so enjoy this while you can!) Important note: you do have to provide your own theme park admission and parking.]
Teams: Players may participate solo, but playing as a team is encouraged. Teams cannot be larger than four players (teams as small as two players are perfectly fine, and in fact that size is perhaps the most common). We will also set up a thread in MiceChat so individuals can find others to band together with. If desired, it's OK to register just yourself for now, with the intent to add more teammates later.
Content: This game will be equal parts scavenger hunt, race, and puzzle-solving. There will be no Disney trivia in the formal sense. But familiarity with the parks will definitely help (or put another way: non-familiarity will probably mean you'll still have fun, but you won't be in danger of coming in first place). If you want to see what previous games have been like, I've made them all available for download (for free) at www.magicpursuit.com (note: some of those older games did have trivia in them, but that won't be true going forward). That will give a good idea of the types of puzzles to expect.
Registration: You must register by sending an email to [email protected] before April 3. Let me know your name and names of your teammates, if any are known yet. Also, give your team a creative name, preferably something to do with Disney or WDW, and include this information with your email if you know it.
Costumes/Hats: Feel free to coordinate t-shirts with your team if you'd like, though this is neither encouraged nor discouraged. The real action will be in hats. There will be a winner, subjectively chosen by me, for the most creative hats worn by a team during the event. Any kind of headgear or head decoration is fair game.
Prizes: There are no prizes to speak of except for listing the winners here on MiceAge; this is a friendly game and I'd rather we do it for the fun and the bragging rights, not the competition. I'm hoping the lack of prizes will curb any desire to cheat. Let's just go have an adventure!
Teams that register by April 3 will receive a return email with the exact details of where to meet up, what to bring to the event, and so on. |
