A new/old item in my feed reader: After a too-long hiatus, Puzzalot is back!
I'm still catching up, but so far I've read some new-to-me info about west coast puzzle hunts from past decades: details on some puzzles from the Los Angeles Midnight-Madness-inspiring games, the first Bay Area Night Game.
It's already got me thinking. There's a scene in the Midnight Madness movie in which the nepo baby villain team gloats that they will win because their van is equipped with a computer. I scoffed at that scene: computers are bad at solving free-form puzzles, and Midnight Madness is a 1980 movie, back in the days of the Commodore 64 and Apple II. Now that I read about some old Midnight Madness puzzles, though, I see that some of them relied on unscrambling some darned-long anagrams. A reporter mentions that a team spent 20 minutes on a gnarly anagram clue. Slow as they were compared to modern machines, a late-1970s computer with an anagramming program and a fits-on-a-floppy-disk word list could have been a game changer. Maybe I shouldn't have scoffed so loud.
Anyhow, Puzzalot is back; its feed URL has moved so you might not realize (blush) it's been back since August, and you should (re-)subscribe at the new place.
