Solution: Go-Karts

Answer: WRECK RACETRACKS

Written by aki and Jonathan

This puzzle consists of a series of 15 audio tracks and a word search grid.

The first thing to notice is that this puzzle involves various elements of Mario Kart Wii. Listening to the audio tracks we might notice that these are all background music tracks from various courses in Mario Kart Wii, peppered with two different types of sounds - a smattering of character voices, as well as with the sound of collecting an item in the game (which, for ease of reference, we will henceforth call a “bling”). Looking at the word search grid we also see names like “Waluigi”, “King Boo” and “Peach” which might have clued us into this as well.

Identifying the music in the audio recordings, we find that they each belong to a different course. We also notice that the length of each audio track corresponds directly to the length of the course name. Therefore it is natural to associate the particular characters with the letter their sound occurs at (bolded below), and also extract the letters that occur during the bling (underlined below). The use of the item collection sound also hints that something useful lies at that position in the word, in reference to how items in Mario Kart are given to help the player get ahead in the race. This makes it clear that extracting those letters is important.

We notice that the courses are ordered alphabetically. We thus turn to the word search. Finding the characters and the racetracks identified from the audio we find that a closed loop circuit has been built into the word search, with every character intersecting the circuit at precisely one cell. Furthermore, the locations of the characters’ intersections correspond exactly to the letters at the time of their sounds in the audio recordings, further confirming their intersections with the circuit. (In the grid below, the circuit is highlighted in yellow and character names are highlighted in green; orange represents the intersections between them.)

Now reading unused cells from the top we obtain “READ ALTERNATE LETTERS FROM END TO FIND TWO CLUES STOP”. We should thus read alternate letters twice, once starting from the last cell and then also from the second-to-last cell. Reading these respectively we obtain “INTERSECTIONS GIVE DRIVERS POSITION STOP” and “REORDER MUSIC STARTING FROM TOP LEFT OF GRID STOP”.

From the first clue we infer that the intersections of the drivers with the grid are their positions on the circuit in a race that they are currently in. From the second clue we are told the starting point of this race is the top left corner of the grid (Mario Raceway) and we proceed around the circuit in that order. Reordering the audio clips in this way, we find that the bling letters spell the message “RACE TILL ONE DRIVER PER SECTION”. This indicates that we should advance all the drivers simultaneously from their current positions and stop when there is only one driver in each section. (In the grid below, the orange cells represent the new positions of the drivers.)

As it turns out, we only need to advance the drivers 8 times to achieve this configuration (which is also the only configuration with exactly one driver per section). Finally, reading off the letters in race order, we find that these drivers WRECK RACETRACKS during their drive (and, in hindsight, perhaps also how the setters broke up and chained together the various circuits to form a mega circuit!).

Author's Notes

This was by far our favorite puzzle of the entire hunt. The first iteration of the puzzle, written by Jonathan, was much simpler than this, and only involved identifying of the various Mario Kart courses by visual description, but both of us were not very convinced by that idea. I (aki) had the idea of using the iconic(fight me) Mario Kart Wii soundtracks (which also resulted in the unintended soundtracks/racetracks pun) as part of an audio puzzle. One thing led to another, and this was the end result! It went through so many iterations that our Youtube feeds were getting spammed by Mario Kart recommendations by the end of it. Our testsolvers universally loved this puzzle as well, so we hope everyone enjoyed solving it as much as we did setting it!

During testsolving, we found that different browsers would display different timings even at the same parts of the audio tracks, for instance, Chrome and Firefox tend to be offset from one another by around 0.3s to 0.5s. We aren't very sure why this happens (if you do, please tell us why – we want to know!), but we opted to give solvers an easy way to download all the audio files to remedy this issue. In addition, we gave character sounds matching their positions on the tracks so that solvers could use the timings of the character sounds in each audio file as “guidelines” that will allow them to identify the correct letters for each bling (by timing relative to the character sounds), which makes reading off the final instruction much easier.