History ARG / MITMysteryHunt

* TheTeam: The Hunt, which generally spans a weekend with a hundred or more puzzles and involves people working continuously until the coin has been found, is pretty much specifically designed for a team-solving effort to be finishable in time. Solving teams often have members taking on more specialized roles based on their knowledge of different fields and trivia. Teams can even be of unlimited size, though at some point adding more people doesn't help.

* WorldOfPun: {{Pun}}s and other wordplay are extremely common, with many puzzles bearing {{Pun-Based Title}}s and even puzzle mechanics that involve and/or were inspired by puns. Puzzle FlavorText is frequently written in the style of a PungeonMaster, with the puns likely being meaningful clues to the puzzle's mechanics.

Early Hunts were around 30 puzzles long, but they have since grown to be over 100 puzzles long, with 10 to 20 meta-puzzles. The winners of the hunt gain the right (and obligation) to design the next year's Hunt. A general intro to the Mystery Hunt can be found [[http://www.mit.edu/~puzzle/history.html here]]. Puzzles can involve a variety of elements, from traditional puzzles/games like chess and (cryptic) crosswords, to a ''huge'' variety of trivia that can be recombined to spell out answers in certain ways.

The Hunt is held every January during Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend, beginning at (around) noon on Friday, and running continuously until a team recovers the coin, usually 40 to 50 hours later. In recent years it's been customary to keep running the hunt a little longer after the coin gets found, so that more teams can enjoy finishing the hunt, especially if the coin gets found relatively early. Though, most teams don't actually finish the hunt, but designers have started catering for that too, with early- and mid-hunt climaxes being common features of more recent hunts.

* AlternateRealityGame: While early Mystery Hunts didn't have a specific theme, more recent hunts generally have some sort of theme "explaining" why everyone is solving puzzles. The gradual shift to a mostly-online format for the Hunt has facilitated this.
* ArtifactTitle: In the first few hunts, the goal was to track down an Indian head penny, which came to be known as a "Coin." As the hunts progressed, what teams actually hunt for has evolved immensely, ranging from a weather-controlling machine to a piece of a manhole cover to a [[WesternAnimation/InsideOut Core Memory.]] This object is still referred to as a Coin even though it is almost ''never'' a piece of actual currency any more. [[spoiler: Although the all-online 2021 Hunt ''did'' have an actual quarter as the Coin.]]

* ShoutOut: Many puzzles contain pop-culture references...which you need to know to solve the puzzle. This may prevent you from breaking open a puzzle if you've simply never having heard of some obscure webcomic or other thing that the designers love, though since you're allowed to look up as much information as you want, there are often ways to get around not knowing a thing -- almost all pop culture stuff has fan wikis or other databases covering them these days. Furthermore, the sheer number of puzzles is often used by Hunt writers to cater to a large variety of niches, so given over a hundred puzzles you're likely to find something you can work on. Anyhow, examples of shout-outs include:

* TheTeam: The Hunt, which generally spans a weekend with a hundred or more puzzles and involves people working continuously until the coin has been found, is pretty much specifically designed for a team solving effort to be finishable in time. Solving teams often have members taking on more specialized roles based on their knowledge of different fields and trivia. Teams can even be of unlimited size, though at some point adding more people doesn't help.

* WikiWalk: In general, consulting Wikipedia and other wikis for information is a pretty much core part of the standard toolset of an experienced solver. Some puzzles are even built on finding Wikipedia links, like [[spoiler:"Walkthrough" from the 2011 Hunt]] and [[spoiler:"Erudite Game" from the 2024 Hunt]].
* WorldOfPun: {{Pun}}s and other wordplay are extremely common, with many puzzles bearing {{Pun-Based Title}}s and even puzzle mechanics that involve and/or were inspired by puns. Puzzle flavortext is frequently written in the style of a PungeonMaster, with the puns likely being meaningful clues to the puzzle's mechanics.

!The MIT Mystery Hunt contains examples of:

* ContinuityNod: Some puzzles make callbacks to past puzzles and even rounds in the MIT Mystery Hunt, and in some cases solvers may need to identify that. One example is "[[https://puzzles.mit.edu/2022/puzzle/midterm-of-unspeakable-chaos/ Midterm of Unspeakable Chaos]]" from the 2022 Hunt, which expands on the same conlang as the one used in 2001, 2003, and 2008.

* WikiWalk: Finding the solution to [[spoiler:Walkthrough]] from the [[spoiler:2011]] Hunt requires you to do this. More generally, consulting Wikipedia and other wikis for information is a pretty much core part of the standard toolset of an experienced solver.

!!List of MIT Mystery Hunts (2020-present)

* MIT Mystery Hunt 2020 -- Hosted by Left Out and based on reviving a theme park.
* MIT Mystery Hunt 2021 -- Hosted by Galactic Trendsetters and based on an alternate universe version of MIT.
* MIT Mystery Hunt 2022 -- Hosted by palindrome and based on Literature.
* MIT Mystery Hunt 2023 -- Hosted by teammate and based on the puzzle creation and artificial intelligence.
* MIT Mystery Hunt 2024 -- Hosted by ttbnl and based on ClassicalMythology.

* TheTeam: The Hunt, which generally spans a weekend with a hundred or more puzzles and involves people working continuously until the coin has been found, is pretty much specifically designed for a team solving effort to be finishable in time. Solving teams often have members taking on more specialized roles based on their knowledge of different fields and trivia. Teams can even be of unlimited size, though at some point adding more people doesn't help.