With a week remaining in the hunt, WIRED decided to up the stakes. Evan Ratliff was set to win $3,000 if he lasted a month on the lam—plus $400 for each of five challenges he would have to complete day by day.
Nicholas Thompson, Ratliff's editor, and Lone Shark Games' Mike Selinker came up with the challenges, and then Selinker figured out an amazing way to add even more detail and intrigue. He called up Will Shortz of The New York Times and received early versions of the coming week's crossword puzzles. He then figured out how to write out the challenges by jumping between words in the puzzle. WIRED published a long string of numbers, so searchers would have to solve the puzzle in order to decode the challenge.
For example, WIRED published a string beginning "G 1E 3SE 1W 8S". That meant you would start with the G in the upper left of the puzzle that day and move one spot to the right (east) in order to get the second letter, then three squares down and to the right (southeast) to get the next letter.
Here are the clues:
Monday: G 1E 3SE 1W 8S 2N 2N 1NW 5NE 4W 1SE 1NE 2S 3SE 5W 11E 5SW 1E 1E 11NW
Tuesday: A 3N 6N 9E 1W 5SW 3W 11E 2W 2E 2E 2S 1W 2SW 1N 4NE 3N 4W 4SW 2N 2W
1N 2N 2NW 5S
Wednesday: G 12S 7N 1E 6SE 13W 9E 1S 3E 1NE 4NW 2S 1N 1SE 1N 3NW 3W 1W 8E
7SW 1S 1NE 2N
Thursday: U 1S 4N 1W 14E 1S 4W 2S 1NE 3W 4N 2W 1SW 2SE 1SW 6NW 4SE 2N 6S 3SW
1N 1W 6N 12E
Friday: S 1E 4E 1N 1E 7N 5S 3NE 1NW 2E 4SE 12W 4E 5N 7E 5S 7W 1NW 4NW 11S
2NE 4E 11N 5W 5S 11E 2N 5W
Here's how they worked in the solved puzzles and what the challenges resolved to:
- go attend a book reading
- ascend a fifty-story building
- grant a hunter an interview
- upload footage of a one mile jog
- spend a day in a david ortiz jersey
