The Mysterious CharlieTan
Read the comments for more info.
posted by FHay @ 8:03 PM
5 The KEYs >>>
FHay:
Chronicling the real life search for the 3rd Urn
Thursday, December 16, 2004
Links
- Poster Submissions
- Sharp's moretosee
- Steinitz Puzzlers
- Peter
- Natalie
- Mike
- Michael's Blog
- VonMuda's Blog
- Steinitz Puzzlers Anonymous
Previous Posts
- Slumber Mode
- No Update
- The Route Leads There
- Politically Correct - Game Summary
- Follow My Leeds
- More to seek
- AntiClimax
- A solution is proposed
- Another Web Site?
- Where is everyone else?
5 The Keys
CHARLIETAN POSTS TO THE UNFICTION FORUM:
All of the PM's do exist, but none of us are using our real names. MTSM, Marlene, and (originally) CharlieTan were all written by different people. The writer who was CharlieTan is finished with his work on this project, so now CharlieTan and MTSM are the same writer (me). Marlene is still on board as well.
The initial story and characters of Peter, Mike, and Natalie were created by a talented writer named Andy Carrigan from Weiden+Kennedy NY. He also wrote the three "perspectives" commercials you see on television, and had brought in Dr. Crypton to create a puzzle for the story. At a fairly late stage in the process (a few weeks before the commercials were shot), W+K brought us in to develop the story and execute it. By "us" I mean Haxan, GMD Studios, and Chelsea Pictures. While this was the first "puzzle" we've done, we have created quite a few online narratives, together as a team as well as individually, including Beta-7 for Sega, The Blair Witch Project (the original site, movie, tv special, etc., Freakylinks, and this controversial one as well. Peter, Mike, and Natalie's journals were written by Orlando-based writer Dr. M.C. Johnson. All the Steinitz sites, as well as (the original) Charlie Tan, and our favorite Norman Dead Norman were written by another Orlando-based writer, Jim Gunshanan. That's my voice as NDN on the voice mail, though -- my name is Mike Monello and I played MTSM and directed the project. My partner Gregg Hale also played a big part in developing the story. Brian Clark is the main man at GMD Studios and he played Marlene. And we could never forget Darren Himebrook, one of Norman's many nephews, who helped him with his eBay auctions and also produced this thing with me.
Thanks for asking, VonMuda. I'm happy to answer any questions that are outside the story here, as long as the Mods are cool with it. I ask that on the SteinitzPuzzlers Forums, however, we keep things in character and not repeat this information there.
I know that Paul worked with Andy on the puzzle, but I believe Paul basically had complete freedom to do as he wanted. If anything, the narrative was the thing that was too restricted, as it was the last thing to be done when in reality it should have been first.
The ending of the puzzle (and I'm not saying it is the Leeds site), is as Paul created it.
As for the Leeds turmoil and some of the other puzzling controversies, it has been fascinating, hasn't it?
Being able to see IP addresses tells me a great deal -- like when trusted community members create multiple aliases to post red herring solutions and throw people off the hunt. We knew people would play the game that way from the beginning and we decided to not interfere since we felt posting red herring solutions was a valid strategy to finding the urns. The one exception -- if they claimed to be a PM or involved in the campaign, then we exposed the lie.
The community aspect, and how you navigate that community is as important to the game as actually solving the clues, otherwise it's no different than offline treasure hunts (like Paul's book TREASURE), which can be worked on alone.
bruttium wrote:
Anyway, I was wondering about the Steinitz Press site. It used to say that pre-ordering would begin November 24 (I think). Then that date passed, and the site changed to say that pre-ordering would begin "soon". Was there a plan to have something take place on November 24th? Did something fall through? Will there ever be any sort of book by Hoffman?
That was a production error. The time frame for developing and writing everything was absolutely insane so there were a lot of things that didn't happen and many things that did and we weren't able to properly handle but did the best we could with the resources we had.
I'm sure there was something planned for that time and it changed (except for that line on the site). There is no book coming out, unfortunately. We suggested they put an ebook out, but I don't think they ever understood why that would be worth doing so no can do.
bruttium wrote:
It would be cool if there was some sort of wrap-up in January. It would be nice to have closure to the blogs and the rest of the backstory. And it would be nice to have a breakdown of the puzzles (and the red herrings!), as presented by the PMs. Something that, say, lists a puzzle, the initial expectations by the PMs, how it was approached by the puzzlers, and how it was resolved--if at all. That would help put to rest things like the "Get a clue or two!" message on the Steinitz Press site. (Sure, the chess puzzle piece is one clue...Did we ever find a second clue on that page?)
I am trying to get approval to post the winners on the forum, which I think will happen once they have been contacted and verified.
As for a chat with the PM's, I'd be willing to do that and I can try to get the others involved too. Let's set it up after the holidays in early January.
patl wrote:
Hello, Mike/Charlie! I am a little confused about the order of events.
patl wrote:
Could you clarify? In particular, I am curious in what order 1) the PNM story, 2) the puzzle proper, and 3) the Steinitz background were written. I figured Hoffman wrote the Steinitz background and puzzle proper, and then the PNM story and Web adventure were created later. Apparently, I got it exactly backwards!
Yeah, it's a little confusing. First there were character outlines and the "story" of the three tv spots. In other words, the events in the commercial were written out (P,M,N around the chateau, Mike drives car into pool), and very slight character back story elements. The Steinitz background was not a part of it. Paul was talking to them about making a puzzle, but the work on that had not started yet. The early teaser spot with the woman looking at the painting and opening her eyes had already been shot without being integrated.
We had to create a story that took all those disparate elements and figure out how to execute it. Paul wrote the puzzle for the first urn and the second urn for us to use in the story, then worked on the third urn puzzle that had to be integrated. The third urn puzzle was given to us as we were writing the second draft of the story. We had no idea what the puzzle would be or even what form it would take. Paul gave us some enigmatic hints about things to incorporate in the story (chess, unnatural death, etc.), but other than that we had no idea. We created the Steinitz stuff based on the first urn puzzle and built it out from there.
Paul wrote the urn puzzles, but we created the "meta-puzzles" such as the STRATEGY puzzle and the DDS puzzle revealing the prizes before the official announcement.
bruttium wrote:
Ah....That explains why those "meta-puzzles" were so straightforward. LOL.
Yes -- those puzzles were created at the spur of the moment, and were never planned or scheduled to happen.
As for the CC skulls, those were something we wanted to do to reward the hard core puzzlers who were contributing to the community. We were going to do about 35 of them and send them out to the best contributors. Typically, we are given free reign to make decisions like that on our own, but as this campaign progressed it became clear for a variety of reasons that the CC skulls would have to go all the way through the nightmarish approval process set up for us. Since they were not scheduled or budgeted, we decided not to do it rather than deal with the hassle, but a few of them escaped due to a communications error on our side. So if you got one, it's a super limited edition collectible!
The loss of the Cranium Club was the second biggest heartbreak for me. The first was a Charlie Tan Chat Bot we wanted to set up -- a bot that you would have to chat with -- say the right things to him and he would give you hints or confirm things for you. Again it was a situation where the time frame and the budget simply didn't allow for it to happen, but rest assured the chat bot will return in (hopefully) the next one... which is being cooked up as I type.
The eBay skulls were both made for the project and the ugly one was indeed an experiment gone wrong!
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