A new “I Love Bees” mailing, over twenty years after the first one
Twenty-one years ago to the day, ARGNet received a jar of honey in the mail. It came from a relatively new San Francisco based apiary, bearing a relatively simple log for “Margaret’s Honey”. Curiously, there were a series of understandably sticky letters shoved into the jar…unscrambling them spelled out the name of a website. After investigating the site for a while, ARGNet was pretty confident this was the launch of an alternate reality game. So, the ARG was given a name – SPiDeR, after a warning message that appeared on the site: System Peril Distributed Reflex. That name didn’t quite stick (pun intended), with fans preferring to call the game The Haunted Apiary.
Most reading this right now would likely know the game better by the website’s name, scrambled up in that vintage jar of honey…I Love Bees. Yesterday, I received a new package in the mail from the Bay Area…only this time, it wasn’t tied to a rogue AI from the future that hacked a small business’ website. At least, not directly. It was from fans of the game, looking to commemorate a community that just got old enough to drink in the United States, if it were a person. And in that spirit, I’m going to set aside ARGNet’s traditional format and engage in a more personal reflection on I Love Bees and its legacy. Because, unsurprisingly: I still love bees.
The custom-built radio was one of many centerpieces of the MIT Mystery Hunt in 2025
It’s late on a Friday night, and our team of investigators have tracked down a lead while investigating the theft of the Shadow Diamond. We’re instructed to send a core group of aspiring detectives to the gala to try and track down the thief. Once our group assembles at the gala event, a helpful bartender tunes our radio to the proper channel, and set us off on a narrative scavenger hunt that weaved across over a dozen buildings on the MIT campus, tracking down the locations of eleven blue paw prints. The twist: since this was a noir detective adventure, our audio helper only saw things in black and white, so many of the colorful signposts along the way were described in shades of gray – fifty, to be exact.
Eventually, our team realized that the film noir world of MITropolis we traced layered perfectly over a map of the MIT campus itself, and that cross-referencing the clues we discovered along the way paired with the locations of those Blue Clues spelled out the identity of the thief.
A map of Downtown MITropolis, used in conjunction with the results of a real world audio adventure
Armed with a name, our full team went up to the gala to confront the thief…only to discover that the culprit was murdered, and the diamond near the body was a fake, covered in scuff marks. Luckily, we were recognized for our efforts and upgraded to trainee detective status.
The MIT Mystery Hunt Means Something Different Every Year At this point, the MIT Mystery Hunt might be the most covered immersive experience on ARGNet, with articles discussing the hunts in 2011, 2012, 2016, 2018, 2021, 2022, and 2023. And while the site skipped coverage of the annual event in 2024, that was because I was part of the team running that year’s hunt.
Some things have been constant about the MIT Mystery Hunt over that time. Hundreds of extremely smart puzzlers gather at MIT (either in person or virtually) over MLK Day weekend to push the boundaries of what a puzzle can be – both as puzzle constructors, and as solvers. There’s a narrative tying that experience together, structured around “feeder” puzzles, and meta-puzzles that use the answers of those feeder puzzles as inputs into a broader puzzle challenge. Teams have a long weekend in January to make it through the puzzles. And the reward for finishing the hunt first is a coin-like object, paired with the responsibility for running the next year’s Mystery Hunt.
Beyond that, the Mystery Hunt becomes an aspirational exercise in what the event can be, presented by teams that are excited about the event for very different reasons. And one of the most compelling questions asked by Death & Mayhem with their 2025 Mystery Hunt The Case of the Shadow Diamond was what it means to be a puzzle hunt community, in the first place.
I have a confession to make: I misplace things all the time. That copy of Ship of Theseus I bought that I was saving for a rainy day? Gone. The transparent lock I used for lockpicking practice? Haven’t seen it in years. My Flynn Lives pin, from the Tron Legacy ARG? Fell off my lanyard at last year’s New York Comic Con, never to be seen again. Many of those lost items are easily replaceable: I still don’t know what happened to my original copy of Ship of Theseus, but I currently have a new copy on my shelf. But some items have enough sentimental value that they can’t be replaced…and that’s where the Ministry of Lost Things comes in.
PostCurious’ newest narrative puzzle game, The Ministry of Lost Things, introduces its players to a world where many of the world’s forgotten or misplaced items make their way to the Elusiverse. Most of these items that disappear from our world are easily forgotten, leading to regions of the Elusiverse overflowing with everything from unwanted receipts to abandoned umbrellas. But sometimes, an item charged with sentimental value goes missing. And it’s up to the Ministry’s Department of Returns to bring those items home.
The Ministry of Lost Things: Lint Condition is positioned as the first in a series of games exploring the Elusiverse, and tasks players with locating one particular item with deep sentimental value attached to it, and returning it to our world. The adventure unfolds across a series of four puzzle packets. Solving a series of puzzles will help narrow down where in the Elusiverse the object can be found, why it meant so much to its previous owner, and where to return it.
The author, visiting a secret puzzle piece for The Tortured Poets Department release in Brooklyn
Back in the late 1960s, rumors started to circulate among Beatles fans that Paul McCartney died in 1966, and was replaced by a lookalike. While official sources refuted the rumors, fans poring through the Beatles’ discography started picking up on clues that seemed to support those theories, ranging from backmasked audio hidden in songs to secret messages inserted into the album covers for Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Abbey Road.
Fans even managed to find a secret phone number written in the stars, if you held the Magical Mystery Tour album up in front of a mirror. According to some rumors, calling that number would trigger the cryptic message, “you’re getting closer…” The theory came to be known as Paul is Dead.
The Magical Mystery tour in its original form, and mirrored (with an emphasis on the “phone number”
Of course, Paul McCartney was (and still is, at the time of this article) very much alive. And there is minimal evidence to even support thePaul is Dead 2.0 theory, arguing that even though Paul was alive, the band intentionally sprinkled clues alluding to his death. The connections were likely a series of apophenic coincidence – with fans creating meaning out of nothing.
Paul is Dead may not have been a “solvable” game, but it still plays a formative role in the creation of alternate reality games. According to an interview with The Beast‘s lead writer Sean Stewart, The Beast‘s creative director Jordan Weisman was heavily influenced by Paul is Dead as he constructed what came to be credited as the first alternate reality game:
Jordan from the time he was very young had been obsessed with, among other things, the Beatles mystery…if you looked at the cover of Sgt Peppers there were clues on it that indicated that Paul McCartney was actually dead….Almost certainly none of that was true, but it was a very powerful urban myth and with the advent of the internet he was thinking, “I think we could do this now…but for real.”
Alternate reality games would return to musical themes a number of times over the years, most notably with the release of Nine Inch Nails’ concept album Year Zero, which started with “leaked” USB drives left in the bathrooms of concerts and culminating in a secret concert raided by a (fictional) SWAT team. But one of the more impressive answers to the question “what if Paul is Dead was real” comes from outside the alternate reality gaming arena. Instead, it comes from the musical career of Taylor Alison Swift.
Taylor Swift Learns to Play the Puzzling Long Game Taylor Swift’s lyrical puzzles started out relatively simple: for her first five albums, the song lyrics featured in her liner notes were all presented in lower case. The only exception to that rule? A handful of capitalized letters that spelled out secret messages. For instance, the message spelled out in the lyrics of Long Live spells out the phrase “for you”, drawing attention to the song’s role as a love letter to her fellow band-mates, and to her emerging fandom.
Speak Now liner notes, with capitalized letters (highlighted in red) for Long Live spelling out “FOR YOU”
Taylor Swift may have started with hidden messages in liner notes, but things quickly spiraled into deeper “easter eggs” hidden throughout her works. In an interview with Jimmy Fallon, Swift explains:
That’s when it started [with the liner notes]…but when it got out of control was when I started to realize that it wasn’t just me that had fun with it, that they had fun with it too, and I should never have learned that. Because then I couldn’t stop, and all I started thinking of was how do I hint at things? How far is too far in advance? Can I hint at something three years in advance? Can I even plan things that far…
…and look. I think that it is perfectly reasonable for people to be normal music fans and to have a normal relationship to music. But…if you want to go down a rabbit hole with us, come along.
The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon
Under that guidance, the puzzles started getting more considerably more varied and expansive. The music video for Me! wasn’t just filled with easter eggs when it dropped in April 2019…it also snuck in the title of her next studio album, which wouldn’t be formally announced until two months later.
Swift even started dabbling in more traditional puzzles through a series of “Vault Puzzles” in support of her album rereleases. Solve a puzzle, and unlock information about the coming release. For Fearless (Taylor’s Version), the vault puzzle was a relatively straightforward anagram. Red (Taylor’s Version) continued the tradition of anagrammed puzzles, but this time rewarded players to complete it with an image overlay to celebrate their accomplishment.
One of 89 Vault Puzzles leading up to the release of 1989 (Taylor’s Version)
The Vault Puzzles for 1989 (Taylor’s Version) ramped up the complexity to a whole new level. Swift’s team partnered with Google to hide a series of 89 different anagrammed puzzles in various Google search results. Fans needed to collectively solve those puzzles 33 million times to unlock news about the new album.
But even the Vault Puzzles pale in comparison to the long road to the release of Reputation (Taylor’s Version), and the surprise announcement of The Tortured Poet’s Department. But to explain that, it’s first necessary to provide a brief primer to the Lover House.
A Missing poster for Buzz the dog (phone number redacted)
While scrolling through TikTok yesterday, I came across a video where an unseen cameraman stumbles across a Missing poster for an adorable dog named Buzz, sporting what appears to be a New England Patriots jersey (although we can’t blame him too much for that). There’s a reward for finding Buzz, although the specifics of that reward aren’t explicitly mentioned.
Even though I haven’t actually stumbled across an adorable puppy named Buzz (with or without a football jersey), I still called the phone number, just to make sure Buzz was still okay. Ordinarily this would be a bit of a jerk move – you don’t get someone’s hopes up when their dog is missing. However, I have an excuse this time – and that excuse provides an example of how to practice responsible alternate reality gaming etiquette.
Tracker and the Lucrative Reward Seeking Business A detail I neglected to mention in this article’s introduction is that the TikTok account I found this “Missing” poster on was called @TrackerCBS, teasing an upcoming drama on the network. The channel follows a handful of aspiring “Reward Seekers”, eager to chase real life mysteries with cash payouts for rewards. One of the people running the channel tracked down a friend’s watch that was lost in a Los Angeles area park, for $30.
An under current throughout all of this is an extremely “hot, mysterious Batman in a SilverStream RV” named C.S., who tracked down a missing girl and likely recovered a stolen 1989 Porsche 911, as well. C.S. is likely Tracker protagonist Colter Shaw. But we’re here for the missing dog poster.
One of the standalone videos on the channel featured the scene of a man approaching the Missing poster in question, lingering on the phone number before moving along. While prior videos focused on fake 555 numbers or obscured identifying details like license plate numbers, this phone number was real.
While combing through the ruins of an abandoned game factory, an urban explorer stumbled across a box sitting on the factory’s conveyor belt. Curious, they tried to piece together why the box was sitting there, but couldn’t puzzle out what was going on…so, they forwarded the box over to you, the player. Can you figure out what happened at the Morrison Game Factory, and complete the task hidden within?
The Morrison Game Factory is PostCurious’ newest puzzletale, with a crowdfunding campaign that went live on Kickstarter earlier today. ARGNet has reviewed a number of PostCurious games in the past, featuring stories ranging from alchemical experiments, a tarot-driven journey through the woods, and an ethereal journey through a dream world. And while the visual aesthetics and themes of each game change, PostCurious games revel in delivering an intensely tactile experience, both as a puzzle-solving experience, but also as a vector for storytelling. When playing the tarot-based Light in the Mist, players uncover what happened to their missing friend by laying out tarot spreads. When Adrift directs players to engage in oneirology, players pore over artistic renderings of dreams to find meaning in chaos. And after playing a review copy of the game, I can enthusiastically say The Morrison Game Factory continues to deliver on that promise.
The Morrison Game Factory components
Morrison Game Factory Delivers Modern Puzzling with a Classic Aesthetic That commitment to delivering an intensely satisfying tactile experience follows through with The Morrison Game Factory. Gameplay revolves around board game components and ephemera pulled from a nostalgic board gaming past that hearkens back to heated game nights of Parcheesi with the family. And that translates mechanically in the puzzling: placing tiles, rolling dice, and rifling through a deck of cards all factor into the experience. But you might also find yourself flipping through handwritten maintenance logs, the company’s product catalog, or…other elements, that unfold over the course of the game.
The fact that The Morrison Game Factory continues to deliver such a satisfyingly tactile puzzling experience is notable because this is the first PostCurious game with a different lead designer at the helm. While company founder Rita Orlov was the lead designer on past PostCurious games, Lauren Bello was at the helm on The Morrison Game Factory: and while it is clearly a PostCurious game, the unique spin Bello takes on that theme is also evident.
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