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Fictional Mystery, Real Prize
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Organizing a contest around your book, TV series, or other work can greatly help in promoting it. A Fictional Mystery, Real Prize contest is the variant where readers are challenged to solve a puzzle, with the clues hidden within the story itself. For example, in a whodunit, the reader who figures out the culprit ahead of time and sends in his answer can win a prize. Or the producers of the show might bury a treasure somewhere, for the first smart and adventurous reader to figure out the cryptic directions within the story and physically travel to dig up his prize. Advertisement:propertag.cmd.push(function() { proper_display('tvtropes_mobile_ad_1'); })Obviously, such a story typically must be written specifically around the contest, so the Fictional Mystery, Real Prize gimmick is usually its main selling point. Once the prize is won, the work might lapse into obscurity and be considered little more than a curiosity, unless it stands as a story on its own. As several examples below attest, such a contest may result in a headache if it's not planned out properly. With the rise of internet and being super easy to share your findings with the whole world, this model is pretty much forgotten, while some internet-based examples exist. An Alternate Reality Game is an advanced form of this. |
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The Simpsons once ran a contest based around the episode "Who Shot Mr. Burns", where if a viewer correctly guessed who shot Mr. Burns they would get animated into the show. However only one person guessed right, but used a college email leading to the team being unable to contact them. They instead had to choose a winner at random and the person who won didn't even watch the Simpsons and instead chose a cash prize. | |
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Wolfenstein 3-D had the "Aardwolf" contest organized by Apogee Software: by finding deep in a secret area a sign saying "Call Apogee Say Aardwolf" and following this instruction, players could win a prize. The contest was abandoned, however, since cheat programs popped up within days of the game's release, allowing anyone to see the sign without effort. | |
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An In-Universe example is the Blue Star Bottlecaps in Fallout: New Vegas. Certain caps of Sunset Sarsaparilla have a blue star on the underside and if any one brings at least 50 of them, an old man named Festus will grant them a treasure. People have murdered for their bottle caps and so can the Courier. It turns out that the bottle caps were just a pre-war promotional gimmick so Clark County (the county Las Vegas and neighboring cities are in) kids can come to the bottling plant for a fake deputy's badge. The Courier gets that, a made-up story about the company for kids, a whole stockroom full of bottle caps (the real treasure as caps are used as currency after the nuclear holocaust), and a unique laser pistol from someone who got in there earlier and died. The The Legend of the Star is based on the Tootsie Pop urban legend, where kids would have to turn in 100 wrappers with young Native American shooting a star for a free Tootsie Pop. | |
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Ready Player One. The author of the book set up a contest that required reading the book, finding an Easter Egg and being the first to beat three video game challenges. The winner Craig Queen received a 1981 DeLorean automobile. The novel itself is also about an in-universe hunt for a real treasure hidden in a virtual world by its developer, with the finder to inherit his company. |
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The Swordquest series from Atari for the Atari 2600. A total of four games were planned, but only three were released. Each game came with a comic book and the goal was to find five words which would qualify the player for the national tournament. These words were hidden in the comic book, and clues to their location were given by the cartridge for solving various puzzles. If the player found all five words, he was given a certificate of merit and his name was entered in the drawing for the tournament. The national tournament consisted of a handful of other finalists competing against each other in a special "tournament" version of the game. Those who won the tournaments could get really fantastic prizes of gold and jewels. Sounds like fun? It wasn't - the games were lousy and confusing and involved more of luck rather than skill. The entries on the Atari Protos page describes each game in detail, the contest, the prizes, and their problems: SwordQuest Earthworld SwordQuest Fireworld SwordQuest Waterworld SwordQuest Airworld |
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| Fictional Mystery, Real Prize / int_66b642b | type |
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Kit Williams' Masquerade was/is probably the best known example of this trope. Illustrator Kit Williams did the book and made a contest to find a golden figurine of a hare somewhere in the British Isles. The book itself had many clues contained within its story on how to find the hare. These involved symbols, wordplay and some arithmetic to figure it all out. However, the winner of this contest won through inside information. | |
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The World of Jonathan Creek includes a Scrapbook Story (with comic-strip framing sequence) called "The Riddle at Castle Cain", in which the reader is given all the information Jonathan has about a mysterious murder, with a prize of a "Mystery Weekend", plus a genuine Jonathan duffel coat and a signed script. | |
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Edgar Wallace's 1905 mystery novel The Four Just Men, published as a Serial Novel, offered a high prize to the reader who could guess the solution to the mystery before the publication of the final chapter. The contest was an utter disaster—for one, Wallace never really predicted that there could be more than one winner. | |
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The puzzle book Maze: Solve the World's Most Challenging Puzzle by Christopher Manson originally offered a $10,000 prize. | |
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Referenced by the Creepypasta story "Pale Luna", revolving around an Interactive Fiction game, in which the player must bury some "gold". Doing so rewards the player with geographical coordinates, presumably leading to real-life buried treasure. An enterprising gamer sets out to find the treasure, and indeed finds something in the indicated location: the corpse of a murder victim. | |
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In-Universe example: Played with in Spongebob Squarepants. In one episode Mr. Krabs takes Spongebob and Patrick in a treasure-hunting trip, playing pirates. For some reason Krabs doesn't allow S & P to read his map. When Krabs is sleeping S & P took their time to investigate the map... and reveals that it's just the pirate-styled board game they played days ago. But just as Krabs is going to punish them for looking at the map, they find the X and consequently the treasure beneath it; after all, the board game was based on the real map. | |
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The Cipher Hunt, a world-wide hunt for the statue of Bill Cipher, was placed after the cartoon Gravity Falls ended. The hunt for the statue included decoding ciphers, assembling a notoriously large jigsaw puzzle, and searching for clues in various places such as a shrine in Japan and a forest in Oregon. The hunt took two weeks and the statue was moved after fans found it — as while it was originally placed on private property with permission, the land came under dispute by another landowner. | |
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