It’s been almost fifteen years since Andy Darley entered Wakerley Great Wood in Northamptonshire with his trusty trowel in hand and dug up the Receda Cube, ending the first season of Mind Candy’s alternate reality game Perplex City and claiming the game’s £100,000 prize. While the game’s main narrative was solved with the discovery of the cube, some of the game’s most ardent fans continued to chip away at the game’s unsolved puzzles, designed to be nigh impossible. And on December 30th, the final puzzle was solved when players got in contact with a man based on nothing more than a single photo, and a first name: Satoshi. After over a decade, the puzzle Billion to One has been solved.

A Brief Perplex City Primer
Perplex City was an alternate reality game that launched in 2005, whose story unfolded through a series of collectible puzzle cards. According to the game’s lore, Violet Kiteway stole an object known as the Receda Cube from the Perplex City Academy Museum. After being teleported to our world, she buried the Cube and posted cryptic messages hinting at its location under the name “Combed Thunderclap”.

Not knowing his own daughter was the thief, Perplex City Academy Master Sente Kiteway partnered with Mind Candy to release a game: Perplex City. The game was designed to let people of Earth learn about their world and the theft, with the hopes that Earth’s puzzle-solvers could figure out what their Perplexian counterparts could not. And so, 256 puzzle cards were released into the world in four separate waves.

Clues on the cards might lead players to websites, blogs, emails, and telephone numbers, and a San Francisco live event even had one character escape the scene in a black helicopter…but for many, the heart of the game were puzzle cards themselves: every card had a silver scratch panel hiding a unique code that players could use to track their solves, powering a live leaderboard. Three puzzles were particularly notorious for being unsolved.

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