Start Slacking Off with MrBeast’s Million Dollar Puzzle Hunt

During the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl Salesforce released a TV spot promising a $1M prize to the first to solve a puzzle hunt in collaboration with Jimmy Donaldson, who runs the MrBeast YouTube channel and media empire. The commercial itself, centering around Slack’s “Slackbot” assistant, is a veritable whirlwind of codes and references, culminating in a bird’s eye view of a QR code driving to MrBeast.Salesforce.com. Luckily, early teaser content linked on the Million Dollar Puzzle page helps point prospective solvers to a few helpful starting points to help make sense of the seemingly herculean puzzling task.

Lone Shark Games confirmed their involvement in helping design puzzles for the event. And while this is the company’s first Super Bowl commercial, they have developed a number of high profile, spectacle-laden puzzle experiences in the past. Wired enlisted them to help run a month long nationwide manhunt for one of their journalists. Cards Against Humanity turned to them for a puzzle hunt leading to a safe filled with hundreds of thousands of Sloth cards locked up on a remote island whimsically renamed “Hawaii 2”. The company even took over the third floor of Washington DC’s Planet Word Museum to create Lexicon Lane, a series of 26 separate puzzle adventures making use of the same space.

Luckily, the contest site implies MrBeast and Lone Shark Games’ penchant for spectacle should continue through this puzzle hunt, noting that “clues are everywhere: videos, websites, and the real world. Anytime you see MrBeast with Salesforce, assume there’s something there.”

Road to the Big Game: Setting the Stage for a Puzzle Hunt

It all started with a tweet: back in December, Donaldson tweeted out a request: “I’ve been sitting on an amazing Super Bowl commercial idea for years. I know it’s random but someone please let me make your brand’s Super Bowl commercial so I can finally make this idea happen”. Shortly after, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff replied, offering up their commercial. This kicked off a flurry of promotional teasers. Donaldson then shared a behind the scenes look at his pitch process. His employees discussed how they use Slack (a Salesforce product) as a pillar of their content production processes. Donaldson even made a Freleng Door Gag inspired video teasing the spectacle of the upcoming spot, as well as a teaser commercial themed around taking the $1M prize money out of the bank.

The $1M puzzle hunt may have only officially kicked off with Salesforce’s fourth quarter ad spot, but those videos contained more than a few clues to give astute puzzlers a head start on the solving. Some of these leads (including the name of Donaldson’s fictional bank) appear to be red herrings. An extended acrostic that flashes in one spot, for instance, teases solvers with the message “this means nothing I just wanted to waste your time lol”. But other moments seem considerably more intentional. Why is there a conspicuously placed barcode on the armored tank receiving a parking violation, during Donaldson’s bank visit? And why does the teller have a series of dates circled in red on all of her desk calendars?

The real entry point to the puzzling, however, is a pinned comment on the teaser video linking to a playlist of nine past MrBeast videos. The pinned comment on each of those videos now links to a series of variety puzzles.

For example, a comment on Beast Philanthropy’s Changing the Lives of 600 Strangers video directs puzzlers to a Sudoku variant puzzle posted on Reddit, using the nine letters in LIF(E)CHANGE instead of numbers. Solving that grid on its own doesn’t lead to any additional instructions…but is there a different piece of information that can instruct solvers on which letters to pay attention to?

Solving the variety puzzle is only the first step of this particular puzzle. And while all the information to solve the puzzle could be provided in the initial image, information on which letters to select from the completed 9×9 grid might also emerge through other parts of the campaign. And that guidance could come from practically anywhere: supplemental videos, other puzzles, or even some as-yet-unrevealed real world spectacle.

As for the Super Bowl spot itself? It seems to be as much a guide for how to discover where to find the puzzles, as much as anything else.

Beyond the Super Bowl Spot: A Growing Tradition

Last year during the Super Bowl, GoDaddy partnered with Walton Goggins to use the SuperBowl to promote their AI site-building services. As part of the spot, Goggins walked over a crime scene before UV lights revealed he tracked footprints over a series of glyphs reminiscent of the Zodiac Killer’s script. Corners of the puzzle community attempted to tackle this prospective puzzle, but weren’t able to extract a message out of it. The verdict: it was probably just there for the aesthetic, although I did get sent a complementary pair of Walton Goggins Goggle Glasses as thanks for my failed efforts in attempting to crack the mystery.

While the GoDaddy puzzle didn’t appear to be real, puzzles have increasingly found their way into ad campaigns. Last year, ARGNet wrote about KFC’s advertisement that snuck 11 puzzles into their newest ad, with the first to crack each challenge awarded a year’s supply of fried chicken. The TV show Push, Nevada used a Monday Night Football placement to provide the last piece of a $1M scavenger hunt puzzle as far back as 2002. Puzzle challenges have even made their way into the Big Game before. Most recently in 2024, DoorDash offered one lucky winner every product or service advertised during the Super Bowl…as long as they could enter the commercial’s excessively long promo code without making a single mistake.

Quite a few alternate reality games have used movie trailers as vector for game launches as well, starting with The Beast in 2001. During the trailer for Steven Spielberg’s Artificial Intelligence, highlighted letters spelled out “WARN HER / JEANINE SALLA / EVAN DIED SINNING”, drawing fans’ attention to the curious credit for the film’s resident Sentient Machine Therapist. Years later, Cloverfield teased the ARG for JJ Abrams’ new film without even revealing the name of the property, instead directing fans to a website themed around the release date: 1-18-08.com. Abrams would later use a Super Bowl spot to not just share a trailer for the Cloverfield Paradox, but also to announce the full movie was already available for streaming.

Advertising placement at the Super Bowl is not cheap – Ad Week reports that this year, the price of some 30 second placements may have exceeded $10M. So, it’s no surprise that brands are looking to extend the campaign footprint beyond the 30 second spot. And launching a flashy puzzle hunt with a $1M prize in partnership with YouTube’s biggest creator looks to be scratching that itch…especially since a few of these puzzles look like they’d benefit greatly from online collaboration.

Which is why it should only come as a slight surprise that this isn’t even the only $1M puzzle hunt launched in conjunction with a Super Bowl commerical this year. RedFin’s Great American Home Search is a scavenger hunt giving away a house “hidden in Rocket and Redfin’s commercial”, that can be identified by solving a series of six clues provided in the Redfin mobile app.

Interested in tackling the Million Dollar Puzzle? Head over to MrBeast.Salesforce.com to check out the challenges.