Gravity Falls and a Decade Long Education in (Bill) Ciphering

Starting in 2012, Disney started airing a new animated series called Gravity Falls following the adventures of twins Dipper and Mabel Pines as the twins spent the summer at their “Grunkle” Stan’s roadside attraction The Mystery Shack, nestled in a small town in Oregon. And while the show was targeted towards kids, the show also presented an increasingly complex series of mysteries for its audience to solve along, introducing a new generation to the world of alternate reality games through everything from cryptic messages hidden in the show itself to a global scavenger hunt.

The series’ primary antagonist, Bill Cipher, only appeared in a fraction of the series’ episodes…but the sentient triangle was at the epicenter of the show’s mysteries and many of its puzzles, with many of the puzzles of the last decade revolving around the question: “what happened to Bill, after his dramatic confrontation with the Pines family in the series finale?” Almost a decade later, The Book of Bill offers answers to that question with an epistolary look into Bill’s past, present, and future in a book packed to the brim with puzzles and ciphers to decode. The book also brought with it an alternate reality game that helps provide context and closure to the series.

“Solving” Gravity Falls, During the Show’s Initial Run
At the tail end of the opening credits to Gravity Falls an aged page from a journal is shown, prominently featuring a one-eyed triangle that fans took to calling “Triangle Guy”. Before cutting to commercials, a voice whispered the only words in the now iconic theme song: “three letters back”. Applying that shift cipher to the message on the screen, “VWDQ LV QRW ZKDW KH VHHPV”, delivered the first of many messages from the show: “Stan is not what he seems”. The cipher also came in handy during the episode’s end credits. During an extended scene featuring a rainbow-puking gnome, a message in that same cipher greeted viewers with a hearty “Welcome to Gravity Falls”.

This pattern followed for every episode of the series: reversed audio messages in the opening credits might provide a hint at how to solve the episode’s cipher, and a secret message was inserted into the end credits, for those who cared to look. After a few episodes, the messages switched over to the Atbash cipher – but to make sure viewers were prepared, the prior episode’s secret message informed viewers, “Mr. Caesarian will be out next week. Mr Atbash will substitute.” To further reinforce that message, the opening theme song’s reversed audio was swapped out to say, “switch A and Z”. Over the course of the series, these ciphers grew increasingly complex, and viewers were introduced to A1Z26 ciphers, the Vigenère cipher, indexing, and even multiple custom cipher languages with in-universe origins.

Every now and then, the solving went beyond the bounds of the show itself. Part of the way through the first season, Disney released a Flash game called Rumble’s Revenge, putting fans into the role of Dipper and Mabel as they fought through cryptids the characters encountered. Interacting with 12 objects throughout the game pulled up messages from the Triangle Guy that, when decoded, revealed his name before he officially appeared in the show: “MY NAME IS BILL”.

This interplay between puzzle and theory continued as the show progressed, culminating in a puzzle-laden cliffhanger. During Stan Pines’ final confrontation with Bill Cipher, Bill’s final words are spoken through reversed audio: “A-X-O-L-O-T-L, my time has come to burn! I invoke the ancient power that I may return!” So, in a show when almost everything else wrapped up neatly, the question remains: what happened to Bill?

Journal 3 and the Cipher Hunt
Shortly after the final episode of Gravity Falls aired in 2016, Alex Hirsch released Gravity Falls: Journal 3, a physical recreation of the journal that guided Dipper Pines through much of the series. But in the lead-up to the book’s release, Hirsch also ran a wholly unofficial fan tribute scavenger hunt that led to a stone statue of Bill Cipher, hidden in the Oregon woods. As part of the hunt’s rules, Hirsch warned players: “if you encounter Bill, whatever you do, don’t shake his hand!”

Players were directed to over a dozen different locations, with local fans activating to find the clues Hirsch left, and figure out their next destination. A wooden plaque at a shrine in Japan hid one of the early clues, in cipher text. Other stops along the way required solving a 2,000 piece jigsaw of Bill Cipher, calling a number to respond to a “lost pig” notice for Waddles, and visiting Confusion Hill (the roadside attraction that inspired the Mystery Shack) to claim a jar of fake eyeballs using a secret passcode.

Ultimately, a group of fans managed to find Bill Cipher’s statue, and dig up a treasure chest of rewards for their accomplishment (while streaming the experience on Periscope). In addition to a plastic crown and sash coronating a member of their party as “Mayor of Gravity Falls”, the chest contained a miniature Bill Cipher statue, a music box that plays the show’s theme song, and a customized copy of Journal 3, and a USB drive with a message from Grunkle Stan. Interestingly, Stan’s message encourages giving Bill Cipher a firm handshake.

There are a number of places where you can get the full story of the Cipher Hunt, including the Mystery Shack Lookback’s podcast interview with Alex Hirsch and Jason Ritter. There are quite a few other overviews of this phase of Gravity Falls puzzling, from the ARGonauts podcast to Inside a Mind, for those looking for the full overview of events.

So, fans found Bill. But, it didn’t exactly answer the question of exactly what happened to him. Just where he went. A special edition of Journal 3 was eventually released that included secret blacklight messages, but the questions remained.

The Book of Bill Infects Our World
During the initial run of the Cipher Hunt, the Oregon Parks Department, a fictional counterpart to the many official National Parks Twitter accounts, started posting about the strange journal they discovered, offering a tongue-in-cheek way to preview some of the pages from Journal 3. And in the lead-up to the release of Book of Bill, the account reactivated as Park Ranger Gus Burnside found a copy of the Book of Bill in the woods, filled with teeth. He soon discovered that the book…infects other books, and spent the next few days trying to get rid of the book. Burying it didn’t work. Burning it was equally unsuccessful. Ultimately, Gus Burnside went missing.

This theming branched out to more of The Book of Bill‘s promotions…responding to Bill Cipher’s billboard ad treated listeners to copious amounts of laughter from Bill, followed by a message in morse code: “BILL IS COMING”. A copy of The Book of Bill at one of Barnes & Noble’s displays even managed to infect the surrounding books, in much the same way that Gus Burnside’s copy did. But the real fun started once The Book of Bill got in readers’ hands.

The Book of Bill: A Book Within a Book, and Puzzles Within Puzzles
The introduction to The Book of Bill explains the book’s central conceit: in a letter taped to the front of the book, Stanford Pines explains how he found a copy of a book. Like poor Gus Burnside, Stan noted that the book can infect other books, and that all of his attempts to dispose of the book failed. Out of options, he tossed the book through a rift, and it made its way to our world. He begs readers to stop – don’t turn the pages.

What proceeds is a puzzle-laden guide through Bill’s life, that finally reveals what happened to him after Weirdmageddon, as well as details around his tragic backstory. And scattered throughout those pages are secret messages, written in a series of custom ciphers. Some of these were already known to fans, at least in part. The series introduced a ciphered language featured in Gravity Falls‘ three journals, and Bill developed his own ciphered text for communication. Stan Pines even developed a rudimentary language with his brother. But two ciphers in particular were introduced with the launch of The Book of Bill: a color-based code that can likely trace its origins to Bill’s home dimension, and the Theraprism cipher, associated with Bill’s present place of residence. Because each cipher text is associated with a different character or place in time, often the secret messages are as much about who is doing the sharing, as they are about what is being said.

One of the more creative ciphers featured in the book involved coffee cup stains scattered throughout the pages: when those coffee cup stains were matched up against a cipher wheel from a page of the book that explicitly promised the book wouldn’t contain any puzzles, a message: “His Dimension Now Deceased, Scalene and Euclid Rest in Piece”.

The book’s puzzles aren’t exclusively restricted to ciphers, however. For instance, many of the book’s barcodes scan through as snarky messages from Bill: the ISBN on the page pictured above, for instance, directs to How to Self-Publish a Children’s Book. More notably: in the marginalia of the page, the text reads “For more Bill Cipher Press fun, visit ThisIsNotAWebsiteDotCom.com.” At the time, that led to a password protected page.

To access the site, readers needed to notice a question hidden within an intelligence test that asked, “What is This Thing?” Viewing the stretched text from the right angle revealed a message: “Need a Password Fine I’ll Talk / It’s the Name of the Eye Doc”. Earlier in the book, Bill got enraged at a section detailing his weaknesses, and replaced the book with an excerpt from The Great Gatsby…an excerpt that mentioned the storefront of Doctor TJ Eckleburg, eye doctor extraordinaire. And for the ambitious readers to reach this page on the book’s release date? They were confronted with a countdown to a date one week later.

This Is Not a Website Dot Com (Dot Com)
Once the countdown reached zero, the website updated…with a picture of Soos holding live wires, and apologizing because the site needed a bit more work. Clicking on Soos would cycle through a number of messages, including one encouraging visitors to check out Disney’s new Gravity Falls lofi album, and a download for the full text of The Great Gatsby, for those who were disappointed that The Book of Bill stopped sharing the classic tale after a few pages.

Eventually, ThisIsNotAWebsiteDotCom.com updated to grant visitors access to its current state: mad scientist Fiddleford McGucket’s laboratory, featuring a copy of The Book of Bill impaled on a dagger, and an antiquated computer with a glowing green prompt box. Clicking on some of the objects in the room pull up messages…but the core of the experience is McGucket’s computer, as the glowing green text entry field responds to literally hundreds of responses. Solutions to some of the ciphers from The Book of Bill work…but also, references to the show, memes, and even hip new slang words might trigger a response. There is no full list, but the Gravity Falls wiki has a fairly robust list.

Some highlights include:

• Audio isn’t the Only Thing Reversed – After clicking on the McGucket Labs logo and getting an explanation of how the system works, there are two prompts provided as tests: GOODNIGHT SALLY pulls up a Bill Cipher shirt reading “Keep on Possessin'”, and morse code on the shoe spelling out DIONARAP. That triggers the conspiracy board image of Bill from the beginning of this article, with bigrams spelling out STOD EHT TCENNOC, providing a series of records on Bill’s involvement in a host of cults.
• Font Packs – A code in the book written in the Pines’ secret code spells out “LOVE YA BRO”, showing a drawing of the two fishing together: flip the card over, and the message says “Wanna Keep Notes from Parents and Cops? Here’s a Hint: Kings of New Jersey”! Entering KINGSOFNEWJERSEY lets you download a font pack for the brothers’ secret code.
  
  But that’s not the only font pack available: typing in Dipper’s real first name MASON provides a list of anagrammed character names, before giving CRYPTOGRAM CODEX as the keyword to get font packs for many of the series’ other ciphers.
• Wallpapers Galore – One of the longest trails of prompts starts by typing RIDDLE – responding in the affirmative guides solvers through a fifteen-step chain drawing on trivia from the book, other prompt responses, and a groanworthy bit of wordplay to arrive at DISPENSE MY TREAT, a series of wallpaper quality images.
• Audio Interludes – The second prompt contained in the McGucket Labs message is to check out HECTORING, an old timey record about Bill Cipher. That’s not the only musical interlude you can trigger, however: DISCO GIRL pulls up a rendition of Dipper Pines singing Gravity Falls‘ alternative to Dancing Queen.
  
  The one prompt you can’t live without, however, is LOVE, which triggers an audio excerpt from the bodice-ripping romance The Love Triangle.
• Special Guests – Typing in CONSPIRACY pulls up a video from Charlie Day, while typing WEIRD pulls up a video for Weird Al Yankovic – both of whom wrote blurbs for the book. However, you can also get a cameo from MatPat by typing THEORY…with a longer variant of the video that sometimes appears.

Prompts range from comedic to revelatory, as BURNSIDE provides the trigger that leads to the unfortunate epilogue to Ranger Gus Burnside’s story, while MABEL fills the room with increasingly more stickers until the lab has been “fully Mabelized”.

Ciphers Notwithstanding, It All Comes Back to Bill
This newest phase of Gravity Falls‘ ongoing flirtations with alternate reality games is intensely satisfying, in part because efforts to dig deeper are rewarded. And one of the biggest rewards? Gaining a better sense of what happened to Bill.

And the story that emerges is rather heartbreaking: Bill was born in a two-dimensional universe Euclydia to genuinely loving parents. But he wasn’t normal: he could see a third dimension. And in his attempts to get his family to see what he could, he destroyed his home. Not out of malice, but ignorance. And he’s haunted by their loss. He still hears their screams. And it’ll take a lot of therapy to work through that.

Gravity Falls as Entrypoint to the World of ARGs
I often think about the formative texts that introduce people into the wonderful world of ARGs: I grew up on The Westing Game and Encyclopedia Brown, and have seen new entrants like Winston Breen lure readers in to thinking about stories as something that can hide mysteries that can be untangled without waiting for the story (or analysis video) to do it for you.

And I strongly suspect that Gravity Falls served as that entry point to a generation of children, eager to learn more about their favorite show and excited to feel ownership at uncovering each new secret, gradually getting exposed to more ways to hide messages. The puzzles in The Book of Bill are not easy: and the fandom’s ability to work through those challenges is in part a testament to the skills they’ve gained through over a decade of practice.