The Hunt Begins: Hunt A Killer experience takes over 200 acres in Darlington, Maryland – USA

A 200 acre living crime scene to explore.

Hunt a Killer is a three hour immersive experience where teams of six people will help solve the mystery of the serial killer.

The Hunt A Killer experience is described as part adventure race – to the next location, part escape room – discover and solve crime scene clues and part interactive theatre with actors.

As the event is designed in an open world format – teams are able to choose how their adventure plays out. Go in any direction located within the event’s land boundaries and see what you can discover.

Search for crime scenes, find evidence and discuss wild theories with your teammates. Then complete physical/mental challenges to collect information about the killer before time runs out. Will your team choose the path to success or failure?

Teams attend a briefing before the Hunt a Killer experience starts at 3pm this Saturday. The FAQ says players may also need to crawl or swim(!) through other challenge sections and that not all teams will finish the experience by the 6pm deadline.

When night falls – the event turns into a party where players can talk about the day’s events over a camp bonfire. Afterwards, players can then pitch their camping tents for the night.

Tickets are $210 USD per single ticket (where a person is matched to a team) and $960 USD per team (each person $160 USD).

There’s a code on the website: KEMPER300 which gives teams a $300 discount at the moment. Since the event contains mature content, the Hunt a Killer website states only players 21 years or older are able to join.

Would you sign up for the Hunt A Killer experience?

Hunt A Killer – Website

The Hunt A Killer team are also planning something for 2017 – mysterious packages in the mail.

 

// Other Escape Room News
Today is the last voting day for the 10 Best Escape Rooms as nominated by USA Today. Experts nominated 20 of their favourite escape rooms in the USA and the Room Escape Artist team covered the story with a great post here.

The final results should be listed on the USA Today website – who will be crowned USA Today’s number one escape room?

Perhaps someone will take up the challenge to do an escape room tour to visit the top 10 US escape rooms after all the votes are tallied.

Essa 🙂

 

What’s Mr Robot’s Endgame and hacking easter eggs from the tv show #MrRobot

Cyber security engineer by day, vigilante hacker by night.

Elliot Alderson is the lead character in the tv show Mr Robot, an expert at cyber security and dreams of saving the world. He gets persuaded by a person only known as Mr Robot to join fsociety, a small group of elite hackers who are trying to take down a mega-conglomerate called E Corp/Evil Corp.

Season 2 is currently airing on television and the writers of the show have hidden one or two easter eggs in each episode. See an IP address during an episode? Type it into a web browser and see where it goes. For example, 192.251.68.254 appeared in the first episode leading to a fake website that had been set up and there’s a full breakdown for this easter egg here. Another easter egg was a hand drawn QR code, which could be scanned and led to another website.

After each episode of Mr Robot appears on television, keen fans head over to reddit forums /r/mrRobot and /r/argSociety to discuss the latest easter eggs. This Google document lists most of the easter eggs that have appeared so far in the series.

Where do all the easter eggs lead?
Kor Adana, a writer and producer for Mr Robot mentioned in a recent article:

And there is an [final] endgame. In order to get the prize, which Adana says will be available at the end of season two, viewers will have to solve all of the Easter eggs. Even if someone has cracked 90 percent of the codes hidden within Mr. Robot, there is no way to figure out the final egg without completing all of the others. – Vulture

When Mr Robot’s Season 2 ends on September 14^th September 21st now, with episode twelve – expect the release of Endgame. What will it take to find the final easter egg?

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The world of Mr Robot doesn’t stop there:
– Web Game: There’s a 16 bit web-based game called Endgame already on the whoIsMrRobot website. It tests puzzle solving and moral dilemmas across four different levels. If you win a level, you get a certain number of chess pieces that appear on the side of the webpage. Interesting to note, fans have only been able to get 28 out of 32 chess pieces in the game so far.

My current theory is this game is going to lead fans into the release of the final Endgame (in reference to the Vulture article above!).

– Mobile App: Fans can get the app called – Mr.Robot:1.51exfiltrati0n.ipa – in the Google’s Play Store or Apple’s App Store for $2.99 USD and over a few days, players get text messages from in-game characters.

The backstory is you found a smart phone near an arcade place, on Coney Island in New York. That phone belongs to Darlene, a hacker who is going to commit a huge cybercrime and the player slowly becomes part of fsociety, the group who want to bring down E-Corp.

Telltale Games, the creators of the game have a behind-the-scenes video of how the game came together on Youtube.

– Novel: The companion novel, eps1.91_redwheelbarr0w.txt is a replica of the journal that Elliot records his thoughts in during Season 2. The book contains removable artifacts – parts of a newspaper, an envelope etc. and is released on November 1^st. Join the reddit forum – /r/MrRobotRWBook.

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What happened when the Season 2 trailer was released?
When Mr Robot’s Season 2 trailer was released, fans saw a phone number scrawled on the side of a cardboard box being labelled as evidence. Calling the number lead to a recorded voicemail and a short online puzzle hunt – here’s the Reddit post which details everything that went down.

In reference to the major hack near the end of Season 1, that happened on 5/09 (9th May) – the first 509 people who got to the end of the puzzle hunt and registered their details received a package from fsociety.

Thoughts
If this was done for the trailer, I’m hoping the release of Endgame at the end of Season 2 is going to be one epic online puzzle hunt.

It’s also been refreshing to see both the recent Gravity Falls ARG and Mr Robot’s current easter egg hunt and just fall down the rabbit hole for a new adventure.

And it shows that people don’t want to only watch entertainment – they want to be pulled into those worlds and play a role within them.

// Other Escape Room News
– The third Great Escape UK unconference will take place in Leeds, England on September 6th from 11am to 7pm. Check out ExExit Games’ post for further details.

Essa 🙂

Fighting off zombies in Fight of the Living Dead: Experiment 88 – Youtube series

DON’T. GET. BITTEN.

Fight of the Living Dead puts contestants into a zombie reality series, that’s part scripted and unscripted.

Over three days, the contestants are left in an abandoned hospital where they must survive the zombie horde spread out through the building. Contestants need to avoid being “bitten” by actors dressed as zombies and get through challenges that determine the overall winner.

In season one, there were six episodes and the whole series can be watched in an hour.

Now the series is back for season two, with ten new contestants, sixty cameras and two hundred zombies to avoid this time.

The team at Alpine Labs spent several months developing the plot of the series including fake character back stories, news clippings and evidence that the contestants discover as they progress through the hospital.

According to episode one the plot revolves around, CONOPs Industries which started in 1950 with the aim to create the perfect biological soldier. The result was the necrotic bioform – a species similar to a zombie. These bioforms could reanimate, follow commands, behave without emotions and can fall into different types of zombie classification: Type I, Type II and Type III which has a special super gene.

Kevin Abrams, from Alpine Labs also has this to say about escape rooms right now (from Mashable) – “Kids are looking for something that looks tangible,” Abrams said of the popularity of escape rooms. “With this experience, you can see how you can do under pressure, you can work with teams and friends. It reminds people of what they are capable of doing: testing their brain and physical acumen.”

Would you watch Fight of the Living Dead?

Catchup on Season One here
Catchup on Season Two, Episode One here
* The rest of Season Two requires a Youtube Red subscription, episode four released on August 31st.

Plus check out the behind-the-scenes videos of how they made Fight of the Living Dead: Season 2 as well!

// Other Escape Room News
– Check out Room Escape Artist’s recent review of the Chicago Room Escape Conference
– And if you’re heading to PAX in Seattle, Washington – USA this weekend – keep an eye out for The Escape Room Revolution: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow Panel on September 3rd.

 

Essa 🙂