Historical Clue Histeria

Ok, this thread is to discuss the clues of the past. NOT to start clues of the future.

The idea is simple: Every year, there is a clue that comes out and of course none of us can resist a challenge. We pull in resources from a pop trivia to photo shop to what Lavery wore to a competition and numerous other things to try and solve an unsolvable puzzle.

In doing this we create 50+ pages worth of thread in a very short time period. The hours that go into researching a sentence or a single picture is impressive. In this thread, let’s post some of the most dedicated discoveries/interesting things from previous clues.

One of my personal favorites:

They gave us a picture of a fish with obscured text, and not only did we manage to decipher the text. We managed to crash every site that had that phrase on it.

Uh oh. I have a feeling that Dave will be tormenting us pretty soon by posting a new “clue”…

Who says he hasn’t already?

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I have to say the 2006 season.

To start out, the official hint was:

…five 'bots tangling with pasta
a game piece obsessed with a shovel’s show
…and seeing Montana’s green heights

Dave’s “hints” included comments about a fox being in the henhouse and hovercrafts and the English Channel.

“shovel’s show” was a reference to “Just Shoot Me”, starring David Spade. But a lot of people went after “seeing Montana’s green heights” and researched Joe Montana, the state of Montana, and anything related. (Montana was just a placeholder, IIRC. Something had to go between “seeing” and “green heights”.) Oh, yeah–some people tried the haiku angle. They hadn’t seen the shape.

2007 was pretty good too. Had lots of people playing with photoshop. One even pulled a fake by inserting a banana. The game piece was, however, correctly guessed.

I haven’t experienced many clues, but I really enjoyed this year’s clue and the fact that we guessed an ice game was amazing. I’m still awed that we can guess the game so accurately.

2004’s clue was a quote from Stairway to Heaven. And that game had stairs even though they were the smallest stairs ever…

  1. They gave us three pretty obvious numbers, and we even got the location correct. Yet we kept looking out 100’s of feet from a statue when the clue was only a few feet away. Tortoise and Hare ftw.

If we guess 5000 things and one happens to be right, is that really accurate?

or how about the fact that if you guess it right you’ll never know until the game is released anyway…

Now, how cool is that?

Even if the exact game, and all its details, were to be guessed in the very first post … who would know?

What’s truly amazing is how close we get in the first twenty or thirty posts. And how it continues for hundreds more… It’s fun, it occupies otherwise anxious minds, and shows just how awesome a tool the Internet is.

I’d have to agree with Eric. 2006 was my favorite. I guess my favorite part was when it got revealed and everyone had that “Aha!” moment. It’s the only game so far (I don’t think) where any post was correct about any part of the game. I wish dave would go back to riddles. They’re fun! :slight_smile:

Yes…100% Yes. I can’t photo shop at all and am pretty well left out of picture fun. However, most everyone can take apart a riddle and find something in it.

Like I said in 2004 the riddle was a quote for “Stairway to Heaven”. We guessed that there would be stairs and there was, so i would have to say that 2006 wasn’t the first year that someone got it right.

Yes, I apologize. Since 2006 was my first kickoff, I wasn’t aware of the 2004 one (until now). It was the only one in “my highschool first generation”.

Its all good, i think that the person who got it right in 2006 had a harder job of getting it right, so i give that person more credit. Also what that person got right had a bigger impact in the game did than the “stairs” did in 2004. Shooting the ball was the main way to score while the stairs where just a small obstacle that you could ignore and it wouldn’t effect how well you played the game at all.

Wasn’t this year’s (09) clue a moonfish?

I haven’t really paid much attention to the clues in the past, but I probably will start paying more attention next year.

Yep.

2003: I’m not sure if this one was the official one or not, but y=ax^2+bx+c.
2004: lines from “Stairway to Heaven”
2005: riddle about amethyst glasses, two baseball players who’d made unassisted triple plays, and pi. I don’t remember the exact wording; search for the thread discussing it.
2006: See my earlier post here
2007: still from the game animation, zoomed in
2008: chain going to statues, among other things
2009: Moonfish picture and a riddle

The game has been figured out once or twice, and elements have been found, but never the entire thing.

Can you explain this clue? I searched and found no real answers.

The best I remember was that it was the scoring formula, or a relative thereof. Or the field shape (due to the massive ramp in the middle).

I thought it might be the ramp, but I can’t figure out why they would have the formula for a parabola. Unless the ramp was parabolic? Oh well, they often don’t make sense. Guess I’ll just have to let this one go.