MIDNIGHT MADNESS 2004!

OK, Midnight Madness is a sort of Scavenger hunt played every December in the limbo week between christmas and New Years. It is sort of based on the Michael J Fox movie from the 1982. p.html">here. This game was run by the team that won the year prior, 24 hours of Angry Apes. So, here is the story of Team Food and Midnight Madness 2004. If you have any trouble reading this page, push ctrl A and that should hightlight everything for you.

Our first task was to finish the pregame. To see how the pregame was solved, go here We new we had to go to the Garland County Library and ask for the "KOKOKO" training video and we also had the dewey decimal number. We watched it and learned about the "KOKOKO" Corportation, where they make cocaine,coca,coca cola, and pornography. The video gave us alot of clues such as bringing the boyscout handbook. However, most of it was just funny. It ended with a 3 seconds of some guy jacking off under a blanket.

The real game started at Haus Braus in downtown hot springs at 6:00 PM Tuesday. Here we were given the rules, met the other teams and got the phone number for "Game Control" a sort of hotline that we called to check in every time we solved a clue or for hints when we got stuck. We also gave them our number. There were something like 15 teams, only 7 would finish. See the guys in the lab coats? Thats the Meatmachine. They are hardcore, and are running game this year.

We spent the first two hours at trying to figure out the first clue. It was so hard, and none of us ever understood it. Eventually Game Control called and said they were worried about us because we never checked in after getting the first clue (which was one of the rules, duh). They gave us some hints that got the game really going. Also the Doctors of Thugonomics, another Fayettville team, started working with us from the very begining. We soon were one team, foodthugs or doctors of foodonomics or something.
Because of a gap in my photos (and because I'm writing this nearly a year later and my memory of the game is quite weak and would make for extremely tedious reading) I'm going to skip ahead a few hours.

At some point we got this ID card. Besides being the best picture of Matt Rowe ever, it was also a clue that lead us to our next position. It also came with velcro mustaches, which were our disguises!

Here we are in a little metal tool shed in somebodies backyard. Three of us had to sit at 3 typewriters with rearranged keys. You see that jumble of letters next to the word "code:" on that card with Matt's picture on it above? We had to type that in to one of the typewriters, then type what came out of that one into the next, and then type that one into the next one. This gave us the adress of an EZ mart, which was our next location. Amy used her mustache as a unibrow.

So here we all are at the EZ-Mart trying to solve the next clue.

Allison examines the clue very closely (maybe too closely) and the clue itself. This clue led us to Wal*Mart where we had to purchuse several items. The staff at Wal*Mart were pretty helpful, they had obviously been doing this all night.

So we got the products. The barcodes on each one had to be lined up with some sheets of paper we got to solve for the next clue. There is another gap in my photos, sorry.

Here we are sitting outside of the fabulous Arlington Hotel. We were here probably two hours trying to solve one clue. It was almost 4 in the morning by then.

I fell asleep on a bench. Note the stache and sideburns I grew just for MM.

When we finaly figured out the clue. It led us to a trail way out in the woods. The car had nothing to do with the clue although at the time we thought it did.

A team that Game Control refered to as "the drunk team" messed up the trail clue so we hiked about a half a mile for no reason and found this really fucked up building. I was scared, it was like blair witch, only there was something like 17 people in the woods with me. The worse part is that this clue would have had lasers had it not been ruined. Well, when Game Control figured out the clue was destroyed they told us how to get to the next clue.

It involved a danced with the devil and a gabba style techno song I would kill to have a copy of.

The sun was coming up, but we were no where near done yet! Little did we know, we actually had hours still to go.

First clue we found after the sun came up was this one, do you get it? Well, some of those people aren't in some of those movies. Figuring that out led us to the next clue.

Here we are outside a scuba/archery place. This clue involved making a listening device out of a solar cell battery and headphones. I had it in under 2 minutes.

We had to go to the Hot Springs tower thing. None of the teams had to pay because meat machine threw a hundred dollar bill at the cashier at the bottom as they all ran in and jumped the turnstile when they were there hours earlier. We couldn't figure out the clue, game control called and told us the adress of where to come. This was the last clue out of 13.
We eventually finished at 1:30 Wendsday afternoon, we came in last but considering how many teams quit, and that the first team had only finished at 10:00AM and how hard it was no one was too disappointed. Our one goal from the begining had simply been just to finish.
Our biggest problem was probably too many apathetic people in our group. If you want to do this make sure that everyone in the group knows that it is going to be really hard and they may end up in the middle of the woods in the middle of night. Our biggest success of coarse was not giving up. I can't tell you how many times I have heard from other people who played that we were the team everyone was really rooting for because we had come not knowing anything and just wanted to try.
This all the clues I managed to gather during the coarse of the game, we got 4 cds 3 of them had all tv show themes that we had to figure out for a clue, one had nothing but a touch tone phone dialing. Did you know that if you play the sound of a phone dialing into a phone it will dial the nubmer? Well you do now.
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