ARGNet: Alternate Reality Gaming Network

The Immersive Side of Hawkins: From Scoops Ahoy to WSQK Radio

January 4, 2026 / Michael Andersen / 0 Comments

A photo-op at the Stranger Things Experience in NYC: an immersive activation by Fever

The final episode of Stranger Things dropped on Netflix on December 31st, allowing fans of the series to say goodbye to one of the platform’s biggest hits before ringing in the new year. But that wasn’t the final transmission from the franchise: for the past six weeks, the UK company Global had been operating the in-universe radio station WSQK: The Squawk as a live broadcast, and the station had one final broadcast to get through before going dark due to “transmission problems”.

Stranger Things leaned in to the story’s 80s nostalgia to engage in an aggressive list of brand partnerships over the years, and many of those partnerships took a decidedly immersive turn. So while it’s worth exploring what six weeks of radio broadcasting looked like for Stranger Things fans, this also marks an opportunity to reflect at the show’s immersive history.

WSQK The Squawk: Radio Hawkins with “Global” Reach

Partners in workplace crime Steve Harrington and Robin Buckley worked at quite a few jobs over the course of Stranger Things: they became friends at the mall ice cream shop Scoops Ahoy for season 3 before switching over to Family Video to enter the video rental business in season 4. The premiere of season 5 saw the pair taking over programming at Hawkins’ local radio station WSQK, completing the nostalgic career trifecta.

Leaning in on that nostalgia, the UK broadcaster Global partnered with Netflix to produce six weeks of content broadcast to coincide with the show’s release. Every few hours a radio bumper does remind listeners that WSQK was presented by Stranger Things, but for the most part the programming is presented as authentically as possible.

In an interview about the project, Global stressed to Rolling Stone how seriously they took getting the sound right, noting:

“Most music and sound-design elements came from genuine pre-Nineties libraries like Bruton; anything newly created was shaped to avoid anachronism. ReelWorld dissected classic American jingle packages and rebuilt them to sound as though they’d aired on a Midwestern station for decades. Modern analog-emulating plugins were used sparingly and intentionally, then remastered through a final signal chain before broadcast.

For true period accuracy, the on-air signal passes through a vintage Inovonics FM250 processor — the same model found in thousands of U.S. stations in the mid-Eighties.”

And while the focus of the broadcasts are solidly fixed on playing classic tunes, a number of interactive segments help the show come alive like Mindy Flare’s “Rewind at 9” segment that tested listeners with song identification challenges. “Talk With Tammy” invited listeners to ask for advice, while “Dial A Dedication” allowed listeners to send in messages to the show’s request line.

A Light Narrative, From an Alternate Version of Hawkins

There’s even a loose narrative that ties together the broadcasts of on air disc jockeys Vance Goodman and Mindy Flare, leading to the station’s eventual shuttering. In the lead-up to New Year’s Eve, news segments start mentioning the radio tower’s signal has started to cut out, providing updates on the station engineers’ efforts to fix it. On January 1st, realizing the station would be going offline for good, the pair offer a heartfelt farewell that manages to namecheck a frightening number of 80s hits.

Because of those engineering troubles the station is canonically offline now, but a fan archived the broadcasts, allowing for segment-by-segment replays on their website.

The King in Yellow as Found Footage Minecraft ARG

November 17, 2025 / Michael Andersen / 6 Comments

The yellow doors at the end of the “Searching For a World That Doesn’t Exist” ARG

“Whatever you do, at the crossroads, don’t turn left. Don’t be fooled. It’s listening.” This is the strange message that a Minecrafter named AVeryLargeMayo (“Avery”) discovered inside a book in his Minecraft instance. At the end of the book, there’s a cryptic cipher that Avery doesn’t know how to solve. So, he makes a video asking the internet to help solve the mystery for him. All told, the video is less than four minutes long. Which makes the 40 minute long video the YouTuber the Minecraft YouTuber Wifies makes unpacking his discoveries exploring the Searching For a World That Doesn’t Exist ARG all the more impressive…even if he is secretly the game’s creator. And it’s that clever incorporation of the “ARG Explainer” video format as part of the ARG’s content that makes this Minecraft ARG so fascinating.

At least on the surface, this alternate reality game is handed to viewers as a fully-solved and crisply edited package, explaining (almost) everything and leaving little to the imagination. And yet, there is still considerable value in going to the “source material”, as none of the game’s three narrators are fully reliable.

Unlocking the First Layer: An Introduction to D3rlord3
The puzzle that Avery presents as the initial call to action in his video remains unsolved, at least at the beginning of the video: it doesn’t quite work as alphanumeric cipher, and similar attempts to treat it like a book cipher are quickly thwarted. Instead, Wifies falls down the rabbit hole by examining an inventory menu that flashes briefly onscreen during Avery’s video…a glitch in the system.

Wifies discovers that taking the first letter of each inventory item (and capitalizing the letters if there’s more than one of the item in the stack) spells out the location of a Google Drive link. So, the first image of a light block would be the number “1”, the three zombie heads in the second slot would become a capital “Z”, and the vine in the third slot would become the letter “v”.

When Wifies checks the URL, he finds the Google Drive link contains three files: two of these files are ~100 minutes of “raw” footage of someone playing Minecraft, and the final file is a PDF of an info doc from an anonymous Minecraft player, noting that the videos represent their “exploration into a strange tunnel I found in my minecraft world.” The rest of the video is Wifies’ account of what he uncovers through those video files from a user we’d later learn goes by the username D3rlord3.

Translating a Minecraft inventory into a website URL is infinitely easier when you made the puzzle

Notably, this is only a puzzle that works when explained in retrospect: the numbers could have just as easily represented indices into the words, and interpreting the blank space as underscore presumes that the solution will be a Google Drive link. But since this is a puzzle constructed to be presented as solved, none of that matters. The link wouldn’t even need to exist, since Wifies helpfully explains everything you’d need to know about its contents.

And yet, the Google Drive link does exist. You can watch the full 100 minutes of D3rlord3’s exploration. AveryLargeMayo’s channel also exists, so you can confirm the secret message is present, and watch him win at a game of SkyWars.

Stephen Sondheim Loved Puzzles More Than You

November 3, 2025 / Michael Andersen / 1 Comment

Image of the custom Ouija board from Midnight Madness 2025, photo by Chase Anderson

It’s Saturday evening. A team of six puzzlers have spent the past five hours traveling across New York City for a hunt, and just decoded a sequence of responses from a custom Ouija board: the answers to the thirteen questions they had just asked spelled out GPS coordinates to a nearby office complex. Upon arriving at their destination, they rush past the Alamo Drafthouse to reach their next destination: a non-profit filled with vibrantly decorated pianos, arranged in rings of four. Multicolored stickers adorn several keys on each piano, practically begging to be played. And identifying the songs they’re about to perform is only the first step.

This experiential snapshot was from the charity puzzle event Midnight Madness. Famed composer and playwright Stephen Sondheim was not directly involved in the creation of this hunt, and none of his songs were featured in the puzzle that unfurled as teams tickled the ivory. And yet, as Barry Joseph argues in his new book Matching Minds with Sondheim, that event (and many more like it) might never have happened had it not been for Sondheim’s passion for puzzling.

Joseph makes an incredibly compelling case, tracing Sondheim’s influence through everything from puzzle hunts and cryptic crosswords to escape rooms and even board games. The book highlights how the puzzles and games that Sondheim created as intimate gifts for friends, family, and colleagues shaped the modern puzzling landscape.

A copy of Matching Minds with Sondheim, along a puzzle bookmark mirroring a Sondheim puzzle

In Good Company: Sondheim’s Surprising Puzzling Cameos

Much of the thrill of Matching Minds with Sondheim comes from learning how deeply embedded Sondheim was across early puzzling communities. Fans of Sondheim’s musicals might be surprised to learn that he moonlit as New York magazine’s first puzzle editor, starting with the magazine’s launch in 1968. During that tenure, he helped popularize the cryptic crossword format to American audiences, simplifying elements to be more approachable. And while Broadway fans may have been familiar with his longtime friendship with fellow composer Leonard Bernstein, the fact that he created a series of three narratively linked board games known as The Great Conductor Hunt to celebrate the man’s 50th birthday is less publicized.

Even Sondheim’s Broadway casts were enlisted into his puzzling fun. For decades up until his death in 2021, cast members would receive puzzles as elaborate opening night gifts…from custom engraved beans bearing a message of thanks for Into the Woods, to jigsaw puzzles with the recipient’s initials etched into the pattern.

Whether your puzzling passion leads you into the realm of video games (he was an avid fan of games like Myst), puzzle boxes (he had an extensive collection) or game shows (Sondheim spent years trying to hunt down a clip from his highly successful appearance on the game show Password), Matching Minds showcases Sondheim’s deep and abiding love for play.

Each of these forays into puzzles and games showcases a man infatuated with the many ways puzzles and games can spark creativity and inspire passion. In terms of puzzling tomes, I turn to AJ Jacobs’ The Puzzler as a tour of passionate puzzling communities. But Matching Minds with Sondheim may be my new reference book for showcasing why someone might fall in love with puzzles in the first place. And that celebration shines brightest (especially for ARGNet readers) in Barry Joseph’s section on treasure hunts, and The Murder Game.

Ministry of Lost Things Delivers a Box of Puns with a Side of Puzzles

October 19, 2025 / Michael Andersen / 0 Comments

Ministry of Lost Things Lint Condition, next to the newest installment Finders Keypers

Last year, ARGNet reviewed the first installment in PostCurious’ episodic puzzle series, The Ministry of Lost Things: Lint Condition. The series of puzzle games center around the “Elusiverse”, a world filled with the lost and forgotten objects from our world enter when they’re misplaced. The crowdfunding campaign ultimately invited over 4,000 backers to join the Department of Returns as scouts, looking to return lost objects of sentimental value to their humans.

PostCurious is back crowdfunding for its second installment of the series, Ministry of Lost Things: Finders Keepers. The newest release is just as whimsical and lighthearted as the last, and packed full with so much wordplay, you could almost be excused for thinking the game’s dozen or so puzzles were just an excuse to inflict a series of tortured puns on players.

The gneesters, who happily rehome lost objects into the Elusiverse…even if means a lot to you

A Surprisingly Heartfelt Story for a Relatively Tiny Box
With the first installment of Ministry of Lost Things, finding out what object went missing was an element of the first puzzle. For Finders Keypers, things start out with a more explicit task: Cary the Carabiner ended up detached from her owner Jenna’s bag, and all of the keys she was securing became scattered. As a scout for the Department of Returns, it’s your job to traverse the Elusiverse collecting witness statements and solving puzzles to find the lost objects, learning along the way why they’re more than just keys to Jenna.

And every square inch of that heartfelt story is packed with more puns than you’re prepared to handle. One of the game’s early puzzles does a particularly good job of exemplifying this: starting off in The Keys (a location initially teased in the game’s first installment), Department of Returns scouts are tasked with tracing down the carabiner’s path through a series of islands that weaves through “Rock” and “Hard Place”, past “Key Largo” and its nearby counterpart “Key Smaller”, and past a series of islets like “Doss Isle, Grocery Isle, and Rept Isle”.

Early puzzle components from Ministry of Lost Things (some pieces omitted to prevent online solving)

If your reaction to that map is more of a chortle than a wince, this is the game for you since that’s the type of whimsy that saturates every part of the game, whether it contributes to the puzzle solving or not. There may be a dozen puzzles to this game, but there’s easily over a hundred literary flourishes, making this just as much a pun-laden successor to Piers Anthony’s Xanth novels as it is a puzzle game.

Masquerade: NYC’s New Immersive Musical Launched With a Secret ARG

September 29, 2025 / Michael Andersen

Free cherry dipped ice cream from Masquerade was only the start of this particular adventure…

It’s the second night of Previews for Masquerade, and I’ve just finished seeing Andrew Lloyd Webber’s newest immersive musical take on Phantom of the Opera. While comparing notes with a friend from the NYC immersive community, a man dressed in black approaches. Leaning in conspiratorially, he quietly tells me: “You see? Everything I told you was true.”

The man who approached me was a ghost hunter named Sean Hunter, who was at the center of a months-long alternate reality game teasing the release of Masquerade. The musical just finished Previews with a gala event, last night. To celebrate, here’s an overview of how we got to the Masquerade.

The Masquerade ARG: A Popup Homage to New York City
At its core, Masquerade teased the show’s existence with a series of popup experiences, celebrating New York City. As ARGNet previously reported, it started with the immersive show’s historic venue itself: to prepare for the show’s transformation, the windows of Lee’s Art Shop were liberally covered with newspapers. Upon closer inspection, however, many of these papers were referencing the history of Phantom of the Opera in New York City. And scattered in between the real papers from the city were a few in-universe papers about L’Opera Populaire.

Shortly after fans noticed this detail, a series of masks started popping up at locations across the city, with luggage tags bearing MasqueradeNYC.com on one side, and the message “if found please call 212-505-5666”. Calling the number (now Masquerade‘s business line) would trigger a voicemail message featuring a music box playing the song Masquerade, slowly winding down before an ominous voice states “he’s back”. The following day, a series of mirrors with the Masquerade logo appeared across the city. Each time, the MasqueradeNYC Instagram would post a story with a picture of where to go, for those curious enough (and quick enough) to find it. A full accounting of these events is listed below.

It’s Been Here the Whole Time: The Boy Who Cried “Dropout ARG”

August 15, 2025 / Michael Andersen

A highly degraded version of Sam Reich, showing where he’s from in this third loop of s6’s “Deja Vu”

I think Dropout’s hit game show Game Changer is celebrating the end of its seventh season with an alternate reality game. Admittedly, when fans of the show posted to the streaming network’s subreddit, the show’s host Sam Reich clearly and repeatedly denied the claims, writing “NOTHING TO SEE HERE” and “THIS IS NOTHING, LOOK AWAY”. These denials were reinforced by the show’s co-executive producer Paul Robalino, who went even further with his statement:

There was nothing hidden at the end of the last episode. There’s no ARG. There are no QR codes. There is no secret to unlock. What is everyone talking about
Paul Robalino, on Twitter

Admittedly, I was convinced there was a Game Changer ARG two years ago, when the team teased there might be more to the season after the “final episode” of season 5. And then I did it all over again last year, when a particularly glitchy episode released during season 6.

But please, ignore my spotty personal track record for this and the team’s explicit and suspiciously specific denials: this time, I think Game Changer really is running an alternate reality game that gives its players a peek behind the fictional-curtain of the show, to help unlock the “real” ending for the season. But before going over that, I should probably own up to past missteps.

The poster for Dropout’s Game Changer: season 5, a season that did not have an ARG

Third Time’s the Charm? The Last Two Times We Suspected a Game Changer ARG
Admittedly, the Dropout fandom doesn’t have the best track record of finding ARGs in episodes of Game Changer. The first time we missed the mark was after the season 5 episode Escape the Greenroom. The episode introduced viewers to Samuel Dalton, Sam Reich’s great-grandfather and occultist. During the episode, Dalton kidnapped and replaced the real Sam Reich, subjecting the episode’s guests to a custom escape room designed by Stash House‘s Tommy Honton.

At the time, this episode was thought to be the ninth and final episode of the season. But immediately after it aired, Sam Reich posted a cryptic message to the Discord, hinting that there might be more to come.

In retrospect, the solution to this was relatively straightforward: zoom into the series’ key, and Sam Reich had an extra “13” up his sleeve, hinting that the show would have not just one surprise episode, but four: a multi-part Battle Royale homage to the Survivor franchise that served as the true end of the season. That didn’t stop fans (myself included) from deconstructing every tidbit of occult lore shown as part of the escape room, suspecting we hadn’t seen the last of Samuel Dalton, time travelling magician and occultist.

The “13” (episodes) Sam actually had up his sleeve, versus Dalton lore from the ARG-that-wasn’t

The next year, suspicions of an alternate reality game started to really percolate after the season’s sixth episode, Deja Vu. The episode centered around contestants reliving the episode on a time loop, with the episode’s footage glitching out more and more after every loop – a theme familiar to fans of Ranboo’s Generation Loss ARG from the prior year. Ranboo would make their own Game Changer debut through a series of guest appearances culminating in the season finale.

This theme was also familiar to Game Changer fans still looking for Samuel Dalton to make an ARGish return. Was the time loop happening because Reich’s time travelling great-grandfather returned to torment a new batch of contestants in a neverending loop? The episode’s frequent glitches and nearly impossible challenges did task contestants with exploring external websites, like the FixItMan78 YouTube channel which provided helpful instructions on how to repair the ElectroBobbleWobble QZ.

Voice actor and YouTuber SungWon Cho (also known as ProZD) as FixItMan78, screaming into a gizmo

So, fans started poring through Deja Vu to interpret the glitches, and even started skimming through past episodes to see if there was a pattern in Sam Reich’s introductions that might reveal whether he’d been secretly replaced by his identical great-grandfather. Multiple promising leads emerged, but nothing that manifested into anything definitive.

A very prominent poster for the Mysterious Samuel Dalton, during “Beat the Buzzer”

The next episode, Beat the Buzzer (which brought back Tommy Honton as a consultant) only fanned the flames of speculation by subjecting the show’s contestants to a number of challenges to earn the right to press dozens of buzzers hidden throughout the studio: this time, famed magician and time traveler Samuel Dalton even made a cameo on an advertisement for his show, next to a literal callback puzzle that challenged contestants to order a buzzer from a fake pizza company.

After the episode aired, some of those games (like Crack the CAPTCHA) were even made playable on Dropout’s site. But ultimately, in season 6 there wasn’t even a card up Sam’s sleeve – sometimes, a time loop episode is just a time loop episode.