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 🙂

Gotta catch ’em all! Nintendo and Google’s Niantic Labs release Pokemon Go – a new augmented reality game into the wild

There’s a serious Pokemon invasion and it’s only just started.

Pokemon Go, an augmented reality game was released last Wednesday to select countries. Players in Japan, America, Australia and New Zealand were among the lucky first to catch virtual Pokemon and live out their dream of becoming Pokemon Trainers.

The game has a staggered worldwide release and will next be available in the United Kingdom and The Netherlands as soon as the Pokemon Go team can put up more game servers to cope with the huge user demand for the game.

Pokemon are fictional animals which can be caught by throwing a Pokeball at it and over time, they can gain levels and evolve into new versions. Eventually Pokemon Trainers level up enough Pokemon to battle in the Pokemon League and to prove they are the greatest trainer of them all.

At level 5 in Pokemon Go, players can choose a team to align themselves with: Instinct (Yellow team), Mystic (Blue team) or Valour (Red team).

The world of Pokemon is overlaid onto the real world, so players must walk around to capture Pokemon or visit locations – PokeStops or Gyms, where players can stock up on eggs, Pokeballs or buy PokeCoins to help them get further through the game.

In under a week, the Pokemon Go game currently sits as the most popular game within the Google Play Store and iTunes App Store. It’s been mentioned the number of US Android users playing Pokemon Go will soon exceed the number of US Android users accessing Twitter or Tinder on their phones.

And it’s popularity doesn’t stop there, in Australia last weekend there have been Pokemon Go walks in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth with hundreds of people turning up to catch Pokemon. With more people around, the more likely Pokemon will spawn in the game.

It should come as no surprise that the mapping technology used in Pokemon Go has been harnessed from Niantic Lab’s earlier success – Ingress. People who played Ingress submitted location data of their gameplay via GPS and interesting landmarks became portals. From this, the portals of Ingress have become the PokeStops and Gyms within Pokemon Go.

“It turns out, Ingress plays a huge role in figuring that out. Major players of the earlier game contributed location data, or intel, to an online database, populating a worldwide map with various notable locations. That’s why Pokémon Go already knows the coolest places for you to check out in your local area, accompanied with photos.” – Polygon.

If you want to read more about the influence of Ingress on Pokemon Go, this is a good read.

Reports say Ingress has been downloaded 14 million times as of July 2016 and Pokemon Go is already well on its way to challenging this, with Google Play listing the number of downloads between 5 million to 10 million already.

Essa 🙂

Official Pokemon Go – Twitter

 

Première Pièce: The Escape Game by Google France – #EntrezDansLeGame

Entrez dans le game (Enter into the game).

Première Pièce, is an escape room created from the collaboration of Google France and We Are Social, a media agency.

The interactive experience runs from May 20^th to 29^th in the heart of Paris, where those lucky enough to get a tester ticket are encouraged to experiment, fail and try again.

The plot involves participants helping a group of artists finish a digital work that’s missing a crucial component – a component which can only be activated in the room. Find the component and help the artists finally get their artwork on display.

Along the way, teams of five will be faced with puzzles that can only be solved using a range of Google products such as Google Search, Google Translate (eg. the phone app which can automatically translate signs between languages), Google Photos, Google Art & Culture and Google Cardboard.

The escape room campaign was launched to get people curious and teach participants about Google’s interests in the areas of art, music and technology.

There are some behind the scene photos of the escape room where in one photo you can see the Google Translate app in use. It’s seriously one of the coolest translation apps because it can get text, then impose the translated message using a similar font over the original background (like magic!).

According to Escape Game Paris’ Facebook page, tickets for the experience were quickly gone in a few minutes after they were released. However Le Parisien still has a competition running until the 25^th of May, where they will be giving away 10 tickets to the experience.

The media release indicates there’s also a daily chance to win a ticket to Première Pièce by solving puzzles on social media (but I haven’t seen any puzzles yet). Also on May 25^th, there will be a livestream of five Youtubers testing the escape room out and on the day Twitter can be used to interact with and change the escape room – for example, interfering with the challenges in the room.

Essa 🙂

Source: lareclame.fr

Here’s the trailer for Première Pièce on Youtube –

It’s part of the adventure and mystery – “And the Escape Room”, episode on 2 Broke Girls

Airing last Thursday, on the CBS channel in the US was the 2 Broke Girls episode featuring an escape room (along with other mature adult themes).

The owner of the diner, Han insists his workers need to build up their teamwork skills and doesn’t tell the team where he is taking them. Flash forward to about the six minute mark of the episode, where the escape room makes its first appearance.

“What the hell is this place?”

Ever enthusiastic Han tells his staff it’s part of the adventure and mystery, while Max shows immediate disdain for the place – “It’s not one of those escape rooms where they lock you in a room and you have to work as a team to get out?”.

The game facilitator arrives, while Earl the diner’s dj states the “You’ll all are volunteering to be locked up in a tiny room?” joke.

A typical waiver form is given to the team and most of them quickly sign the paper without looking at it. Next, a red bucket is handed around to put mobile phones in so the team can’t look up the answers on Google. The industrial metal door is pushed to the side and the team are shown in to the escape room.

It’s completely dark – in the scene nothing in the room can be seen at all except the light from the door way. Once the door is closed, the team is left stranded in the dark until a lamp above a picture of Einstein glows bright.

Someone in the team points out there’s several light switches on the wall near the painting. Underneath Einstein, it states to choose correctly or lose five minutes of game time. 26 light switches but which one to choose? The first guess is which letter represents light? The answer guessed is “L” but Caroline steps in to correctly guess it might have to do with Einstein’s equation of e=mc2 and within the formula, the speed of light equals the letter c.

After the third light switch from the top is switched on, all the lights in the room turn on to reveal a Alice in Wonderland theme. From the back of the room, an actor appears as the Mad Hatter and there is one hour to escape.

Riddles are given to the team to solve, ‘One – take it out of the package it goes in your mouth. Chew it too long and it will go south’ – the answer being Gum. Another riddle involves Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael J. Fox, the Pope and Madonna.

Then the episode moves forward quickly to the last fifteen minutes, with a riddle – “If it were so, it might be. And if it were so, it would be”. The show hints at the answer in the picture of Tweedledum and Tweedledee in the nearby background. (Note: Specifically Tweedledee says this in Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll.)

At this point, the team are frustrated they can’t make any progress and Caroline gets more upset after an earlier incident with Max – then proceeds to jump down the rabbit hole prop at the back of this room. While the game facilitator tries to warn Caroline, he then mentions there’s a couple of rats in the hole. Then he says while rolling his eyes, this place is a death trap (and an inaccurate representation of plenty of real life escape rooms).

Then realizing the trouble the team is in, the game facilitator tries to use the emergency code to exit the room but the door won’t open. Eventually the facilitator confesses to not knowing any codes in order to help them get out of the room.

The episode finishes with two of the team members breaking through the escape room floor (by accident).

Well, that’s one way to escape a room.

Essa 🙂

Breaking into the wooden box with five locks at BreakoutEDU Australia’s launch

This past Friday, Intervirals attended the launch of BreakoutEDU Australia which was hosted at Google Australia’s headquarters. Arrived at Google’s reception just in time for the start of the talk presented by Nick and Kim from the EdTechTeam. The room was mostly filled up with teachers and at least five participants in the crowd who had played an escape room before.

A wooden box stamped with the BreakoutEDU logo sat on a chair in front of the crowd with five locks attached to it. There were a couple of number locks, a word lock and a directional lock. The game played was called Time Warp, with the purpose of informing participants about the history of communication. Only 45 minutes were given to the group to “break into” the box and once the countdown timer started, everyone started to look around the room for clues.

About five minutes into the game, several clues were found so had to steer the group slightly to put them down on the stage so everyone could have a chance to see what was found. The first two locks were easily unlocked and then we all fell into a red herring that many participants got stuck on. The lovely BreakoutEDU AU team gave us pointers in the right direction.

The red herring contained a clue to solve the last puzzle which was related to a maths problem that turned out to have two possible answers. Eventually the right combination was found and all the locks were removed from the box and inside was … a black pen. 😀 It was great fun with a significant mention going towards Scott and his friend from the Escape Rooms in Sydney blog, plus The Engima Room Sydney staff and around two to three educators who helped the group get pass the last puzzle.

Some thoughts and suggestions –
At random times throughout the game, I glanced at some of the other participants who were sitting down on chairs instead of actively participating. There should be enough puzzles for everyone to have a focus on and also work at during all stages in the game.

The maximum amount of people in an escape room tops out around ten to twelve people (SCRAP, Escape Room LA, Trapped in a Room with a Zombie are some examples). Plus in these places, there is also a room/s that participants can spread out and explore with puzzles located in different areas around the room.

With a BreakoutEDU box, you will always have to come back to that one box with the locks on it (unless there were multiple boxes spread out in a room). Perhaps five students per box at a maximum and to scale up to a full classroom room of say thirty students, have around six BreakoutEDU boxes.

With clues placed around a room, perhaps have multiple copies of it or actually I would advocate giving students all puzzle pieces and the BreakoutEDU box at the start – it can easily get frustrating if a puzzle can’t be solved because a clue was hidden away in corner somewhere.

Finally also got the opportunity to ask the BreakoutEDU Australia team if they were going to host a local event site in Australia as part of the BreakoutEDU Game Jam that’s happening in January next year. The team is considering it – so fingers crossed.

A huge thank you to the BreakoutEDU Australia team (Nick, Kim and Chris) for hosting the event and looking forward to seeing what they do next!

BreakoutEDU Australia: https://twitter.com/breakoutEDUau

Essa 🙂

A history of room escapes – the origins of room escape bloggers and their inspirations – Part One

It stared at me from the other side of the train before I realised what it was. It was an advertisement describing a real life room escape game. I was on holiday in Singapore at the time and I remember being curious enough to later on finding myself standing in front of a free wifi hotspot within Changi Airport googling what the business what about. Soon after I found a Wall Street Journal article about room escapes and as a result, I wanted to find out more about the topic, write about it and that’s how this blog started.

As I thought of this blog reaching it’s one year anniversary – I became curious about how other room escape bloggers started their blogs and what inspired them, so I asked as many of them as possible – one question:
“When did you first hear about room escapes and why did you develop an interest in it?”

Everyone has their own room escape origin story to tell and here are some of the responses received from places such as Canada, Singapore, USA and the UK.

Name: EscapistTO
Website: https://escapistto.wordpress.com/
Reply: I’ve always had a general interest in mystery novels and movies, but I didn’t really hear about the idea of live action room escapes until I stumbled upon the blog http://claviscryptica.com/. I thought, damn, that sounds so cool! I wish Toronto would catch onto fads quicker! So I can pretty much be credited for willing it into existence.

Name: BHox (xTheBHox)
Website: s-capegoats.tumblr.com
Reply: First heard about it from a friend, probably, somewhere in 2011/2012, and had played some of the online escape games at that time so i thought it’d be pretty cool to have a real-life computer game. I was interested but was still a student and it was expensive. Nevertheless, I tried a couple of rooms (not initiated by me) in 2013 and found it fun especially because I love puzzles and a challenge. Eventually, I gathered a bunch of fellow nerds (sorry guys!), we enjoyed it, and that’s how it started. 🙂

Name/s: Errol Elumir, Matt Silver, Manda Whitney
Website: EscRoomAddict.com
Reply: We first heard about Escape Rooms sometime in Spring of 2014. We did our first Escape Room around June, 2014. All three of us are huge fans of adventure games, some of us starting way back when Infocom was in its golden years. A real life Escape the Room was a natural fit. Since then, we haven’t been able to stop!

Name: Dan Egnor
Website: http://www.escaperoomdirectory.com/
Reply: I’ve been interested in “puzzle hunts” and puzzle events in general for a long time. For several years, I’ve run http://www.puzzlehuntcalendar.com/ and with my puzzle team (the “Burninators”) play most of the local (San Francisco Bay Area) puzzle events. One day someone sent me a listing for a “Real Escape Game” run by SCRAP. I didn’t go right away, but I was curious, and eventually I start attending their events. When they opened Escape from the Mysterious Room locally, a bunch of us had to try it out!

We escaped by the skin of our teeth and it was an amazing experience.

For a while, as far as I knew “escape room” was just something this one SCRAP company did; I didn’t know there was an international scene! But then suddenly last year a whole pile of escape rooms started opening locally. I had the idea of organizing an “escape room crawl” where I got 10 friends together and we did all the local escape rooms (except the SCRAP rooms which we’d already done) in one day. That meant going to six different rooms, which was a long day (around 10am-9pm, including travel and breaks) but it was an amazing time.

Already several new rooms have opened in the area and we’re considering another “crawl”. And whenever I visit a city I make sure to do the local escape rooms. I dream of going to a major hub like Toronto, London, or Budapest and having a huge escape room holiday! [Essa: This is something I dream of too. I wonder how many other room escape bloggers share this feeling too?]

Anyway, since escape rooms are permanent(ish) installations they don’t fit the format of puzzlehuntcalendar.com, but I wanted to catalog them so made a quick directory listing which hopefully complements some of the other directories at Intervirals and elsewhere. I had no idea I would find hundreds and hundreds of rooms worldwide, with more opening every day.

Name: Chris M. Dickson
Website: Exit Games UK, http://www.exitgames.co.uk/
Reply: The first thing I ever wrote about room escapes dates back to April 2013 – see chris.dreamwidth.org/24796.html – but from context presumably I had read about their existence in countries outside the UK before then (maybe weeks before, maybe months before). I have long been interested in spectactular puzzle games and events, dating back to at least 1999, so I’ve long kept an eye out for what might be possible and dreamt about getting to play them myself some day.

Name: J.
Website: http://escapingsg.wordpress.com/
Reply: In January 2012, I happened to see Singapore’s first Real Escape Game installment mentioned in one of those ‘interesting things to do this weekend’ articles in a local magazine. The concept seemed intriguing, so I bought tickets… and have been hooked ever since. Escape rooms took a while longer to get to Singapore, and it was only in July 2013 that I tried my first room escape, after it was featured in the local newspapers.

I’ve always loved puzzles, whether they are mathematical ones or murder mysteries, so I guess it was pretty natural that I’d end up liking room escapes. I think they’re especially fun thanks to the added dimension of interactive, physical aspects, and the need for teamwork. People often complain that Singapore’s a boring place with not much to do, but room escapes provide a great alternative when you’re tired of the usual cafes, movies or shopping malls.

Footnote: As several responses were received back from fellow bloggers, check out tomorrow’s blog {PART TWO link} to read about the inspiration behind other room escape blogs including Escape Games Review (Canada), Escape Room Sydney (Australia), QMSM (United Kingdom), Escman League (Malaysia), Escape Game France (France), Room Escape Artist (USA) and Escape Reviewer (Canada).

Feel free to share how you discovered the concept of room escapes in the comments below.

Essa 🙂

Enlightened vs. the Resistance – What I learned as an Ingress Newbie

The majority of this week’s blogs are inspired by Locked.hu’s interactive room escape experience on mobile devices that can be experienced this week at the Szigest Festival 2014, in Budapest. But what if you are no where near there? I started thinking about other room escape experiences that can be accessed on mobile devices, so that no matter where you are located – you can still have fun.

Of course, I had to start off with Google’s Ingress App. It’s one of the best apps that combine real world locations with a virtual game.

Ingress is a mobile game which allows a person to choose one of two sides – the Enlightened (green colour) or the Resistance (blue colour). Apparently all around us in the world, there’s this substance called Exotic Matter, also known as XM. Users who choose the Enlightened side believe XM will help humanity, while the Resistance are more cautious of this new substance. XM frequently appears in large amounts near portals.

Wait – what are portals? So portals are significant landmarks in the real world, wherever you are. Within your country, a portal may be a historical building, a sculpture or other feature. When Ingress is running on a mobile device, take a walk – the purple sparkles of XM on the map should be automatically collected by your device.

While XM is pretty to look at, it’s also useful and should be considered as energy in the game. Use your XM to hack a portal and collect items that drop out of the portal then. Don’t forget, stand near your portal location to hack it and once you hack a portal for items, you can’t hack it again for another 5 minutes.

The fun starts when there’s teams of Enlightened players and Resistance players battling for control of a portal.

Remember how you can collect items by hacking a portal? Often two things fall out which are collectable: resonators and Xmp bursters.

If you want to claim a portal for your Ingress side, there needs to be eight resonators in your inventory and which are placed on the portal location. Once all the resonators are placed, congratulations! You’ve claimed an Ingress portal.

Otherwise is the portal already claimed by a rival Ingress team? Take out those Xmp bursters, from your inventory and which you’ve collected from hacking portals. Lock onto the rival portal and fire the Xmp bursters at the portal. If you hold a portal but its damaged by a rival team, your mobile device will shudder as if its really under attack.

There’s plenty more I still need to learn about Ingress but what have I learned so far from it?
Or some tips for newbie players:
# 1: Hack portals to level up within the Ingress game
# 2: Find a location where there are plenty of portals to hack – usually cities are the best location
# 3: Don’t be afraid of asking questions – have fun! There is an incredibly supportive Ingress community and discussion board out there.

Ingress can be downloaded to iPhones in the App Store, Android devices in the Google Play Store or at – https://www.ingress.com/

– Essa