We at Decode love magazine issues that are interwoven with puzzles and mysteries, such as our Mystery issue from a few years back. Author and 74-time Jeopardy! champ Ken Jennings has added to the genre with this month's deeply involving contest in a special secrets-packed issue of Smithsonian magazine. I caught up with him in our mutual hometown of Seattle, and we chatted about the project.
Wired.com: I just watched the video for this hunt, with you all shadowy and spooky-like. Tell me about what this hunt is.
Jennings: The Great American History Puzzle is a puzzle contest, going on all October at the Smithsonian's website. The first puzzle is a coded message in the pages of the latest issue of Smithsonian magazine (available free online as well) that leads to a hidden password. The password unlocks the website, where we'll be rolling out ten devious puzzles of all kinds over the course of the month. The first player to solve all the puzzles correctly wins a $10,000 grand prize—either a trip for four to DC with a private behind-the-scene tour of the Smithsonian, or just in convenient "American cash" form, accepted at many retailers.
Wired.com: I have heard of this form. I'm just playing along as we talk. I am currently examining a certain declaration for a message. Let's say I was to find said message. Would I expect to tour other famous documents in... oooh, the Zimmermann telegram! I'm not spoiling anything since that's on the front page of the contest, but tell folks about that.
Jennings: The Zimmermann telegram was a coded message from Germany to Mexico in 1917 suggesting an alliance against the US. The US broke the code and boom, World War I.
Wired.com: Boom indeed. When does the puzzle wrap up? Just when someone finds the answer?
Jennings: The ten follow-up puzzles roll out all month on a set schedule. Answering the first nine will help you solve the tenth. The last puzzle gets unlocked on October 22, and at that point, the first set of correct answers we get via email wins!
Wired.com: Did you get to learn things you didn't know about American history while making this hunt?
Jennings: I learned a lot about the Smithsonian! I wanted this quiz to feel like an old-timey treasure hunt, with cold stone and buried secrets and whatnot. It turns out the Smithsonian is perfect for that! James Smithson is buried in a crypt in the basement, lots of people don't know that. The guy never even visited America, but after he was dead we sent Alexander Graham Bell over to Europe to exhume his body and bring it here. Plus its vaults are full of all kinds of crazy stuff. "The nation's attic," they call it.
Wired.com: I'm imagining you wearing Abe Lincoln's top hat and taking the Wright Flyer out for a spin.
Jennings: Sadly, I wrote the whole quiz from here in Seattle, so the virtual archive was all I had access to. Maybe next time I'm in DC, I can get a better tour and see where all the crazy Nicolas Cage treasure-hunting stuff happens.
Wired.com: Because everyone wants to be in National Treasure. A tour de force of logic and sensibility. Obviously, the Smithsonian knows everything about everything. Did they help you with the quest?
Jennings: The Smithsonian was very helpful...mostly because their whole catalog is online now. At one point, someone kept asking me, "Are you sure we have [item redacted] in the collection?" And I kept saying, "According to the website, you have three of them!"
Wired.com: So how did you get involved in this? Did they appeal to your patriotic duty as a puzzlemaker?
Jennings: The magazine was putting together a "Secrets of American History"-type issue, and wanted to build in some kind of puzzle contest. They'd been talking to me about blogging for them and asked if I had any ideas. It was like I'd been waiting my whole life to hear that question. I knew exactly what I wanted to do: a hidden magazine message, like Games magazine used to do, and then an online treasure hunt that sort of recalled those lavishly illustrated British puzzle books of the 1980s, you know the genre? Like Kit Williams's Masquerade or Mike Wilks's The Ultimate Alphabet. There'd usually be a big prize, often a real prize buried somewhere, and nothing but these cryptic paintings to look at to try to figure out what the rules were. So I wanted to do a virtual version of that—virtual, so that no one had to run out and start digging holes in things.
Wired.com: Yeah, I know that's a lot of fun. Just curious: Did you ever see our Mystery issue of Wired with JJ Abrams?
Jennings: I did, loved that issue. I was definitely ripping off—er, homaging—that kind of thing.
Wired.com: Coolness. What was it like for you to get deep inside that rabbit hole?
Jennings: I ended having to construct a lot of types of puzzle that I was a fan of, but it turned out that didn't mean I was necessarily an expert-level constructor of them yet. Crosswords, logic puzzles, codes, spatial puzzles, etc. So there was a lot of blood, sweat, and tears. Is this insane? Will anyone get what I'm doing here? In the end, I had some hardcore puzzle types playtest it, and it seemed like they were fans. I'm not looking forward to ever doing it again, but I hope the next time someone else designs something like this, that I get to play it. It's way quicker.
Wired.com: That's my hope too. Hey look, someone has! My take on immersing yourself in a puzzle subject like this: It's as much a treasure hunt for you as it is for your reader. You're finding out all the cool things you can do before they do.
Jennings: Right, it's like you're the first solver. The little "aha!" of an elegant construction is the same whether you're the solver or the designer. Actually, it might be better for the designer. But you do wonder if anyone if anyone can duplicate your work without being the one who thought it up. That's the hard part. There's a code in the contest that I thought wasn't too hard. As of this morning, only ten people have solved it. Oops.
Wired.com: Yeah, that's always the way. Everything is always much more difficult or more easier than you thought.
Jennings: I wrote this to appeal to hardcore puzzle people like me who grew up on the same diet of code and puzzle books that I did...but that may or may not be the average subscriber to Smithsonian magazine. So I'm hoping the contest finds its true, geekier audience online.
Wired.com: It is where we live, after all.
Jennings: Oh also, I was doing a World's Most Ornery Crossword from an old Games magazine last night and I realized after it was yours.
Wired.com: Was it any good?
Jennings: IT WAS AMAZING I HAD TO SMOKE A CIGARETTE AFTER
