Project Highlights: Find Buzzy
Published: 2026-10-31
"Find Buzzy" was an ARG that promoted, and released alongside of, the Stolen Kingdom documentary. The film's theatrical release included many official tour stops which featured a post-show Q&A panel with the filmmakers and producers, as well as distribution of physical "trailheads" for the 25 puzzles of the ARG. These trailheads took many forms including postcards, pins, and even cassette tapes. My role in bringing this ARG to life was primarily in puzzle design. In this role, I had the opportunity to create numerous puzzles spanning a wide range of disciplines and difficulties. Including the final, and most difficult, puzzle of the game. A selection of my work is detailed below.
Puzzle 25
Premise
For Puzzle 25, I was tasked with a creating a cipher that could be released at the start of the game, but which would be uncrackable without additional clues that could be discovered throughout the run of the game. Something that, in practice, no computer could brute force. Something that would keep the players talking and theorizing about for a long time. On May 9, the Find Buzzy ARG launched with four puzzles immediately available. Three of them would be solved that day, but Puzzle 25 wouldn't be solved for another four months.
The puzzle I designed was a Vigenère cipher using a one-time pad as the key. The key itself could be found in the
Library of Babel. For the uninitiated, the
Library of Babel is a website that contains all possible pages of 3200 characters (using a-z, space, comma, and period).
In other words, this library contains every book that has ever been written, will be written, or could be written
(in English). Within this infinite library, the key can be found within Hexagon: "c0de", Wall: 2,
Shelf: 3, Volume: 19, on Page 1.
In order to find this needle in the haystack, the players would need to find clues hidden through the game.
The Clues
Trailer
The very first clue regarding Puzzle 25 came in the form of the trailer for the ARG. This trailer was played in theaters before showings of Stolen Kingdom and shared on social media. In the trailer, the grid of all 25 Find Buzzy puzzles is shown in its initial state: four yellow (available, but unsolved) puzzles, and 21 red (locked) puzzles. One-by-one, all the red and yellow puzzle change to green (solved), until finally only 25 remained yellow. Then after a pause, it too switched to green. Thus establishing that Puzzle 25 would be difficult and likely the final puzzle to be solved.
Puzzle 14
The image in Puzzle 14 contained a few ciphers to solve, but there was more hidden beneath the surface. The image contained an unrelated secret. Using OpenStego, a second image could be extracted from the first. "secrets.png" contained a 5x5 grid of squares. Most of them were red. Squares 4 and 13 were green, and 25 was yellow. This grid represented the puzzle grid on the ARG's home page, and it revealed a connection between Puzzles 4, 13, and 25. Specifically, that 4 and 13 needed to be solved before 25.
Puzzle 4
The clue hidden in Puzzle 14 definitively showed the relevance of Puzzle 4, but even before that clue was found, a connection could be made between 4 and 25. In Puzzle 25, Walt's eyes are covered with a black bar. Likewise in Puzzle 4, Buzzy's eyes are also covered with a black bar.
The solution in Puzzle 4, was
"C0DE2319" (with a zero instead of an o). Which is a reference to the film Monsters Inc. This was
simultaneously the identifiers used to find the key for Puzzle 25. Hexagon: c0de, Wall: 2,
Shelf: 3, and Volume: 19.
Puzzle 13
Puzzle 13 took players into the Library of Babel's Image Archive. Which is similar to the text section, but it contains every possible image. With the secret image in Puzzle 14 revealing Puzzle 13's relevance, it didn't take players long to start searching the Library of Babel again.
Puzzle 24
The trailhead for Puzzle 24 took players down a long digital scavengers hunt (as detailed in the section below). One step in that process was running the code "fndbzzy24" on the ARGHouse website. As a few curious players found, if you ran the code "fndbzzy25" instead, something else would happen. The clock on the website would change to 23:19 and the minutes would stop ticking by. This clue pointed back to the solution from Puzzle 4.
Putting it all together
The Library of Babel from Puzzle 13 combined with the solution from Puzzle 4, led players to the exact page with the one-time pad needed to decode the cipher in Puzzle 25. Now, if you think this solution requires a leap of logic, you're not wrong. We actually had more clues planned, including social media postings and even hiding something on the Blu-ray release of Stolen Kingdom, but in the end, none of those were needed. The players were able to use the clues laid out above to successfully decode the cipher exactly four months after it was first released.
Digital Scavengers Hunt
Puzzle 24 was one of the few puzzles to feature a fully digital trailhead. While I didn't create Puzzle 24, I did create the trailhead used to reach it, which started on Instagram with a pair of posts shared by @arg.house, @stolenkingdomfilm, and @antennareleasing. The first post contained a partially obscured QR code, which could be cleaned up to reveal "findbuzzy.com/crimson-clupea-harengus". A valid url, but the page labeled itself as a red herring.
In the second post, faint text could be read in the left margins of the image, which read "imgconceal" — the name of a steganography tool. Typically, steganographic data is destroyed by social media sites upon upload. Metadata gets stripped away and images get automatically compressed and converted to other formats to reduce files sizes. Finding a steganographic technique, and creating a suitable cover image, that could survive this compression took a bit of experimentation. But it was worth the effort to achieve a result often considered impossible. With the image downloaded, players used imgconceal with the password "crimson-clupea-harengus" to extract a text file called "run.txt". This file's only contents was the text "fndbzzy24".
Going to arghouse.com, which is themed to look like a Windows 95 desktop, players opened the run dialog (as hinted by the filename) from the start menu and entered the command "fndbzzy24". The wallpaper on the site then changed to one with a Stolen Kingdom theme, the clock changed to midnight (a clue to be used once past the trailhead) and Clippy popped up and said "SilentEye" — another steganography program. Players then took the wallpaper and ran it through SilentEye with a blank password. Which extracted a message revealing the URL for Puzzle 24.
Cassette Trailhead
Puzzle 22 was one of many to feature a physical trailhead which could be found at one of the theatrical showing of Stolen Kingdom included in the film's official Q&A Tour. However, unlike the other physical trailheads, I made something more involved for the tour stop in Birmingham, MI.
I made audio cassettes and hid them around the Birmingham 8 theater in the hour leading up to the showing. The cassettes were packaged with custom labels and cases. A total of five tapes made it into the hands of players that night. But it wasn't until the following day that one of those players solved the trailhead.
The cassettes were all identical and each contained the URL for Puzzle 22, but the URL could only be found by viewing the spectrogram of the audio.
As a side note, I also created 2 other spectrogram based puzzles for Find Buzzy which you can read about in my spectrograms blog post.
Calendar Event
As someone who makes a lot of puzzles, I'm always on the lookout for new mediums. As much as possible, I want players to experience new methods, techniques, and mediums in my puzzles. And in Puzzle 9, I did just that.
In this puzzle, the players were greeted with an image (made by someone else at ARGHouse) captioned "you've got a date with Buzzy". Followed by an "Add to Calendar" button. Clicking the button triggered a download of a calendar event (which I created). The file was in the standard iCalendar (.ics) format, and it could be imported into just about any digital calendar (such as Google Calendar). After importing it, players would find a new event in their calendar on April 30, 2020. The event was titled "What was my original name?" and it contained a location listed as coordinates.
The coordinates led to Disney's Discovery Island, which as Wikipedia will tell you, has had many names over the years. However, the original name, and the answer to the puzzle, is "Raz Island".
While the date of the event wasn't important for solving the puzzle, it wasn't random either. April 30, 2020, was the date YouTuber Richard McGuire was arrested on Discovery Island for trespassing. An event which is covered in the documentary.