Entry posted by GSR
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Working at Microsoft has certain advantages.
Today that advantage was gathering with about 90 other teams (for a total of about 950 interns) to take over campus in a massive puzzle hunt.
This year's theme was video games; we gathered in one of the conference centers where we were greeted by a variety of costumed characters (including Vivi from FFIX; respect points for that, MS). After an intro video paying homage to a variety of villains old and new, we were provided with our swag (T-shirts) and puzzle sets and provided a conference room to take over. A few of the challenges we faced throughout the day:
- Solving a Katamari-based maze to get instructions to stop by Building 18... where we then had to roll a real Katamari around the building and pick up clues, which we then had to decode. (Answer? Carl Sagan, of course - who else would be the king of all Cosmos?)
- Real-life Angry Birds, via slingshot and water balloon.
- Using a set of clues to decode the preferred boss order for a hypothetical new Megaman X game, and then using that order to find a different message hidden within the physical attributes of the bosses.
- A few mad dashes across campus to find additional pieces of the main meta-puzzle.
- IDing/matching game soundtrack samples. To say I rocked this one would be an understatement.
- A truly diabolical game of minesweeper, the results of which provided code in semaphore.
And, of course, plenty of free pizza. The objective was to use the answers and results from the puzzle set to solve a first metapuzzle which then lead to a second metapuzzle; while we solved most of the puzzles and the first metapuzzle, we regrettably missed the second metapuzzle answer by a few minutes. Still, we did pretty well points-wise, coming in about 25th out of the teams.
All in all? Couldn't ask for a better way to spend a Saturday.
(And Swert - if you read this, no telling your brother any of the details. The FTEs have their shot at it in a few weeks. 
)
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