Remember that GTA V quest in which you hunted Bigfoot? Then it wasn’t really Bigfoot and it felt kind of anticlimactic? Turns out there was a lot more to it (isn’t there always?) and of course that meant I had to load up the game again and see if this was real!
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A few days after GTA V was released there was a bit of a “hunt” for Bigfoot. People wondered if it was real. Turns out it was just a randomly spawning quest that had you chase around a man in a suit. But thanks to people ripping apart the game’s code, we now know more. Recently some tucked-away evidence was uncovered, and an as-yet-unknown secret was revealed:
Image credit: rkRusty
This little collection of code told us there was a peyote plant in the game that effectively turned you into Bigfoot yourself. But the brain-boggling, ever-confusing fact was that those coordinates didn’t actually point to anything special. Frustratingly, you could high-tail it to each spot and find nothing. Until some recent discoveries were made.
This is the point when my friend and I – being totally carried by the success of these heroic coders – started scouring the landscape, looking for any peculiar signs. It wasn’t our efforts that provided the much-celebrated eureka moment, unfortunately — even though we were at the right spot at nearly the right time. It’s possibly the type of thing that can only be brute forced by a large community. Certain “conditions” had to be in place before the trip-inducing plant would reveal itself:
It had to be foggy or snowy. But that’s not all… The original plant could only be found on a Tuesday, and there were seven coordinates. That implied the other plants corresponded to different days of the week. With that logic, our global high-hunters found their pot of peyote at the end of the rainbow:
The next step was happily something my hunt-buddy and I could do alongside everyone else in the world, as it was more of a skill challenge. What do you do once you’re Bigfoot? Easy. You chase down every other Bigfoot you see and kill it! This was actually a very tough nut to crack however. Much like that equally confounding underwater hatch. Among all the potential victors, it was Louis C. LeBlond who succeeded first:
The reward for the whole ordeal? The ability to turn into “Teen Wolf”. That’s the main character of an 80s comedy co-starring Michael J. Fox, and the slightly-less-famous F-Troop star James Hampton, while in the game’s director mode. There’s certainly something innately alluring about the whole “Bigfoot chase” as a concept though – and it’ll turn out to be quite a cool prize, especially for fans of GTA machinima – because our obsession with the beast goes a lot further back in history than just the Colorado mountains. Would you believe even the Vikings and other Morse civilisations had a name for it? They might’ve called it something else (“Skellring” or “barbarian”) but it kind of goes to show this is a fantasy chase shared by many around the globe.
Comments
66 responses to “The Time We Went Bigfoot Hunting In GTA V”
http://www.kotaku.com.au/2016/06/months-later-players-finally-solve-gta-vs-bigfoot-mystery/
Thank you for reiterating the same story from only 3 weeks ago…
Yeah, but now it’s a cross-pomotional thing with the new Netflix show.
Also, what’s up with the red commas?
http://www.kotaku.com.au/2016/07/win-6000-of-home-entertainment-gear-thanks-to-netflix-and-stranger-things/
lucky someone here is paying attention.
Considering the article was rewritten for the puzzle, the differences in writing style between the two articles should give a hint to where the puzzle lies.
So may as well start trying to sort it out. A red comma touches the following letters.
EDGYETYCDSXNE
Which are the end letters of the following words:
code uncovered brain-boggling frustratingly landscape moment Tuesday logic world victors Fox Hampton prize
Alternately, the following words come after a red comma.
we and ever-confusing you looking unfortunately and our as it and while especially
I’ve been sat with these sentences / collections of words since the article opened, alas I suck at puzzles. I’ve tried with word unscramblers and anagrams… We’ll get there 😛
I don’t remember seeing this the first time the page was posted but…
However none of the combinations I tried worked.
Tried http://www.kotaku.com.au/sitemap.xml, just in case.
So I am thinking the link to Vikings must be a part of it.
Something to do with Morse code, given they said ‘Vikings and other Morse civilizations’ instead of Norse.
Also the reference to the underwater hatch – morse code
The underwater hatch was Tap Code, not Morse. I tried turning the EDGYETYCDSXNE in to Tap and then using the resultant numbers… 15142254154454131443533315 – no joy.
Also note each word in quotation marks:
hunt
conditions
Teen Wolf
Bigfoot chase
Skellring
barbarian
I saw the same, just wasn’t sure what the next step with the letters was in respect to them.
Could be a letter replacement type thing where you use the letter before what’s coming up
“edgy” makes me think of cryptic crosswords – as if it’s a clue for what to do with “etycdsxne”
they also said to check out these pages.
Want more help? There are a few puzzle societies that do this sort of thing regularly! (And who also helped us out with this!) We totally recommend you check out their pages:
http://www.maths.usyd.edu.au/ub/sums/puzzlehunt/2015/faq
http://www.ms.unimelb.edu.au/~mums/puzzlehunt/2016/puzzleguide.html
http://puzzle.cisra.com.au/guide.php
Red commas?!
Screw this shit, I’m out before I started. I can’t see that small amount of red, I’m colour-blind! :'(
The colour of the commas isn’t important, all you need to know is that all of the commas in the article are highlighted (except for those in the blockquote which is never part of the puzzle). But yes, apologies that the commas are hard to make out as different – we tried a whole bunch of other colours in testing and red was the only one which would stand out and be somewhat readable.
Oh, and hi everyone 🙂
Where are our hints?
No dramas, I know I’m in a very small minority who can’t see it :3
Less competition for the rest of the competitors this way anyway 😉
why are some commas red and others not?
m8
my brain is a potato atm
Got it. Took me a lot of trial and error – but I eventually got there… Keep at it guys!
(and yes, I know I work at Gizmodo. But the guys at Kotaku are doing this – I don’t know anything!)
Liesss!!! tell us your secrets, it’s the handshake isn’t it!!!
It’s probably misty or foggy where he is.
Yeah, I got it as well. I copied everything into Word to help me a bit, but wasn’t too hard once you a confident of the method.
I got it too. Once I figured out how it worked it was pretty easy to get it.
Yes same here – got the wrong answer the first time until I realised where I made my mistake and then worked it out.
EDIT: I got it. It’s pretty easy to get tripped up though.
Dangit, I was SURE I had it but, none of my translating makes sense. Starting to feel like Lisa Simpson in that ep where everyone gets the cereal box riddle and not her T__T
This comment made me laugh!
Love that episode.
Don’t worry, you’re not alone on this one 🙁
mate I am in the same boat too. I think I went down too many rabbit holes and now everything is black. =(
Hahaha! It’s like… every time you think you understand it a bit better, you go through the article with your new approach and it makes even less sense. The closest I got to anything was ‘sea’ from a paragraph – getting one actual word, wrong or not, made me feel so victorious
Edit: Nope, I was barking up the wrong tree
Got it as well!
How have people figured this out?! I’ve got no idea where to even start!
It’s got something to do with the red commas and something to do with Morse code. I’ve just worked it out but there is a “gotcha” or two along the way.
So far I have tried
1. EDGYETYCDSXNE (and anagrams)
2. the Morse code by taking all the “.” and “,” (red commas)
3. numeric or ASCII conversions.
4. phrases
5. gone into HTML to hunt for clues…
gaarrrhhh! Some help please…
Try 2 again, but you’re missing a punctuation mark that’s also everywhere in the articleFinally got it :P.
Thanks for the hints.
Very very neat puzzle, and as what others have said, pasting into Word definitely helps to be able to see things properly.
the hint helped. 🙂 in the more literal sense. Cheers!
I got it! but considering how long it took me compared to others I doubt I’m in the running for the prize. neat little puzzle, pasting into Word definitely helps to see the answer.
I can’t see how pasting whatever into word helps, especially after trying to do so.
It lets you play around with the formatting and spacing rather than having to just remember where things are.
There’s no time limit really to solve these individual puzzles, just the overall metapuzzle at the end.
OMGGG I did it *collapses*
Eyyyyy, finally got it. There sure is a lot of hyphenated words and full stops in this article. Probably just a weird red herring though, not like they’re used for anything
The annoying part is that I found the pattern, did the puzzle, but the resulting phrase wasn’t accepted..
Disregard.
I trusted yoooooooouuuuuuuuuuuuu
Normally I’d advise against that. I lie about a whole bunch of stuff but I’d like to think I’m helping
There’s usually a method to the madness but what I’m going through is pure madness. None of my conversions work, I’ve used tap and morse and anagrams on words and letters on both sides of the commas and none of them translate to anything legible. Also I’m unsure if hyphenated words count as one word or two. I’m probably overthinking it but there can’t be than than 4 layers of conversions, right?
Yep, definitely overthinking and missing the obvious. *facepalm*
I think my brain is about to explode. I still can’t quite get it. I copied the document into word, highlighted all of the .’s and -‘s in red so they were easy to see and then started deleting the text around them. I used the red ,’s as an indicator of “this is the end of this morse code letter” but the combination of letters I ended up with made nothing, even when put into an anagram site. GRRRRRRR!
You are super close: keep at it!
If you’re just using the commas as this is the end of the letter it throws you off a bit. Try adding a break when you hit the end of a paragraph as well. I had a butt tonne of issues with trying to use the website decoder type things so I ended up just doing it manually. You won’t need a dejumble website, basically what you decode from the article is the answer itself and there’s no further stepsGOT IT!!! Thank you so much haha. I was so freakin close and realistically I should have been able to figure it out by the time I was 3/4 through it
@Tofu I used TextEdit and find/replace to get rid of all the noise [a-z] -> ” and that really helped in putting this challenge in perspective. I also ignored the paragraph breaks and that lead me down many dead ends.
Dude literally dying here 🙁
Got all the
. , () ? ! ‘ “”
Using the paragraphs as –
and turning all the punctuation into dots is death and got me no where…
i wanna attempt puzzle 2 but getting killed in puzzle 1
Hey man, it’s not all the punctuation you need. just the full stops, hyphens and commasGot some words, out of it and it made clear as day what it could be…. yet im not sure if im typing it in right… i got the name of a game ending with “Road”, am i writing it wrongly in the answers ?in short form “S+M H** *** Road” hope that doesnt spoil it for others.Finally got it