dropout | ARGNet: Alternate Reality Gaming Network

MIT Mystery Hunt 2026’s mascot “The Child”, an extra-dimensional Puzzle Monster (PuzzMon)

It’s January 16th, and I’m sitting in a classroom on the MIT campus. Hours earlier, I joined thousands of puzzlers attending a paranormal research conference called CRYPTIC, where an intrepid researcher named Burnham proved that cryptids do exist…but in the process, opened up a rift to another world that threatened our very existence. The only way to close the rift and save the world: befriend that world’s puzzle monsters (PuzzMon) to save the world. This is the 2026 MIT Mystery Hunt, an annual puzzle event that attracted over 5,000 puzzlers to spend a long weekend tackling a series of wildly creative puzzles.

Shortly after the conference, the PuzzMon.world website went live. By the time the evening rolled around, our team had already solved a handful of puzzles. I had just come off working on a puzzle themed around fanfiction tropes and the Omegaverse, and took a break from puzzles to explore the world of PuzzMon through a fully playable 16-bit video game world to unlock more puzzles for our team.

All of a sudden, two teammates settle down at my table and dump a box of black jigsaw puzzle pieces on the table, and start slowly matching pieces. I ask them what they’re working on: they explain it’s a puzzle called Starry Night. This is more interesting than what I was working on, so I drop everything and join them. Curious, I ask: “our team was given a set of two blacklights in our team’s welcome kit…do you think there’s secretly UV ink on the puzzle?”

Starry Night, under a blacklight – the otherwise black jigsaw is easier to assemble under the right light

My suspicion was correct: there was secretly UV ink on the puzzle pieces, and under the right lighting the puzzle is much easier to complete. In under an hour we have a fully assembled jigsaw puzzle, covered in ultraviolet stars and astrological signs. But that’s only the first step of the puzzle, and for the next hour or so we would try and figure out how to connect the dots to transform those hidden symbols into a word or phrase that is the final solution to the puzzle.

Puzzles at the MIT Mystery Hunt can take just about any form, so over the event’s 45 year history the teams running the event have used it as a platform to push the limits of what a puzzle can be. And because the prize for a team winning the MIT Mystery Hunt is the responsibility for running the next year’s hunt, every team has a slightly different answer to what that spectacle entails. For 2026, the puzzles themselves served as center for the spectacle. But be warned, as this article will spoil puzzle mechanics of a number of puzzles for those looking to solve after the fact.

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.

Tag: dropout

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