Foolishly trying to solve a decades-old, terribly-designed treasure hunt.
Thanks to Jason Dyer's excellent blog Renga in Blue, we now know of the unsolved real-world treasure hunt Alkemstone by long-defunct game developer Level 10.
In this obscure game for the Apple ][ home computer, the "player" is presented with a maze to explore. On the walls, ceiling, and floor of the maze are written clues to the location of a "treasure" buried by the developers in the real world. It was meant to be found by a player, dug up, and presented back to the developer for a reward of $5000. But the game flopped, and nobody ever found (or perhaps even looked for) the treasure.
Which means it's still out there, waiting to be found.
Those of us who can't let an unsolved puzzle lie have decided to try to find the treasure before it is lost forever. This repository is an attempt to gather all of the clues and the current going theories into one place for easy tracking.
If you'd like to help solve the mystery, the best place to start is by reading Jason's first blog post describing the game. From there, it should be fairly clear what the contents of the repository mean.
The Photoshop file brings all screenshots into one layered image. Layers are named as ## - Description where ## is the corresponding screenshot number and Description repeats the image text when possible. Layer visibility is set to off but all clue layers are set to Lighten mode. This allows one to simply turn on visibility for any number of layers and see them overlaid, in the hopes of finding new patterns from such image compositions. Combining images #18 and #21 in this way forms a compelling argument for this method of discovery.
If you have ideas about the clues and you don't see them reflected in the repository, please submit a pull request and we will add them!
Thanks for hunting,
- Casey
PS. Special thanks go to Andy Boroson, who modified the original source code to the game in order to get the clean set of clue screenshots on which this repository is based.