Adrian Hon, Perplex City

Have you seen the Ebay auction for one of the 333 parcels? How do you feel about that?

We gave the parcels away for free, people are free to do with them whatever they wish. In this case the auction is quite good for us because it helps to build buzz and attract attention towards the search for the cube.

Will Magic: The Gathering cards be important to this quest too? If not, could you like make it seem like they will be for a little while, because I have a huge box of them that I'd like to get rid of and I wouldn't mind being able to sell them for an artificially inflated price?

Sorry.

Damn. Is there an incentive to play the game for those not purchasing cards?

Because it's fun, important and interesting? It's interesting that some people seem to treat the puzzle cards as some terrible, worthless thing that must be bought in order to help retrieve the cube. But looking at it from the other side, I suspect that many people buying the cards will have absolutely no interest in retrieving the cube and instead just want to solve the fun and interesting puzzles.

What happens if you get "Terraquested?" That is to say, could someone "find the cube and collect the reward" within the first week of the game or is there some built-in preventative measure?

I can assure you that if it was that easy to find the cube, we would have already found it.

How can you make the clues to find the Cube if you cannot find it yourselves?

This is a point of ongoing confusion. Neither Mind Candy Design nor anyone in Perplex City knows where the cube is. All of this isn't just a bit of fun – Perplex City needs the cube to be returned, and they believe this puzzle game is the best way of doing that, by attracting attention to their situation and by getting information about Perplex City to as many people as possible. The 'clues' are information about people and places in Perplex City, and its history, and the Academy hopes that people on Earth will use that information in new ways to find out where the cube is.

On a related note, how exactly do you communicate with Sente? How did he first contact you?

I'm sorry, I really can't say.

Are the badges for wearing around in public so that we can find other people to trade cards with? If yes, then do we really need more reasons for people to label us geeks?

Geeks?! Didn't you hear that puzzles are cool now? Just look at the Da Vinci Code and National Treasure, as well as Numb3rs. Anyone with a leitmark should wear it with pride. In any case they're designed to be subtle and recognisable only by other players – it's not as if you're wearing a badge emblazoned with 'GEEK' on it.

Clearly you haven't been to the U.S. recently.

We noted that a recent puzzle required knowledge of an English language colloquialism about watching paint dry. Will this game truly be an international effort, or will certain regions of the world have a slight advantage over others?

Well, the puzzle cards are mostly written in English and were made by the Perplex City Academy in close collaboration with Mind Candy Design – an English company, so perhaps some bias may have crept in, albeit unintentionally. We have tried our best to make the game as accessible to a worldwide audience as possible, because we need all the people we can get to look for the cube, and it could be anywhere on Earth.

Will this be tied into Bovine Unite?

I don't think I'm aware of that site…

Oh you simply must go to bovineunite.com. You may wish to contact the proprietors of Whipsmart Ice to warn them of the possibility of a cow revolution…assuming cows can also communicate between our world and that of Perplex City. Cows are very mysterious, after all, and good at keeping quiet about things.

You have been accused of over-hyping Perplex City. How much of the press you have received was solicited by you and how much was solicited of you?

We have not sought to solicit any press. Perplex City is very interesting to the media for a whole boatload of reasons – alternate realities, the missing cube, the other world, the online presence, the reward, the collaborative nature, and so on – so it's not surprising they like to write about it. Of course, we didn't ignore them if they contacted us though. But we had many more important things to be doing than chasing after the media; for example, the game has taken longer to develop than was initially planned. Having said that, now that Perplex City is going to have its public launch in the coming weeks, we will be talking to more people from the press.

Believe it or not, but the Group 333 launch was a preview for players, not our official launch. You didn't really think that was it, did you? Expect to be reading about Perplex City in all sorts of places that are totally unconnected to computer games….

You do realize that if I print that, it is likely to cause some of our more fragile members to suffer physical, mental, and emotional "setbacks," do you not?

Heh.

SpaceBass is better read than fed. He takes time out from constantly reprogramming his phone to update this site.

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