Unexpected Convergence in Researching Game History

Last night, I was continuing my quest for more information about Stephen Sondheim's Halloween Hunt from 1968. A certain Los Angeles Times article quoted in one of his biographies was my goal. At the same time in a separate window, I was reading Larry's entry on a death during a Russian urban hunt. He linked to Pervasive Games as a source. In the original window, I typed in the keywords I was looking for. The first link to come up was, disappointingly, my own blog. But the second link was from Pervasive Games!

Funny coincidence, right? Okay, sure, but the link I pull up is about how The Last of Sheila inspired Don Luskin's Games which inspired Midnight Madness. Hmmmmm...sounds vaguely familiar, almost like I wrote it myself. But it turns out that the people at Pervasive Games wrote a book and had been doing the same research I had at pretty much the same time, getting the Los Angeles Times newspaper clippings from Luskin close to when I got them from Patrick Carlyle. Talk about coincidence.


An idle thought in the back of my mind has been that beyond satisfying my own curiosity, perhaps I could put what research I uncovered into book form. But it looks like the folks at Pervasive Games have already done that, saving me a lot of time, travel, and tests of my limited interviewing abilities.

Puzzles in (old) Fiction: The Last of Sheila

First off, The Last of Sheilais badly named. Knowing it was a movie with a murder/mystery with puzzles, Karina asked sarcastically, "So what'd they do? Cut Sheila up into pieces and whoever finds the last piece wins?" Actually, the title's from a throw-away line: "When will we see the last of Sheila?" asks one character disgustedly.

Apart from that and the glaringly bad 70s fashion, it's a good movie and a pretty intelligent one too. With puzzles.

As far as the puzzles, we're promised six. Sadly, only two (okay, kinda three) are shown. The first one is okay and it's possible to solve the first part of it (the second part goes by pretty quick as one of the characters vocalizes his deductions). The second puzzle isn't all that much of one and can't be solved by the viewer.

The entire puzzle game centers on a yacht named (in memorium) "Sheila". Each of the six players has been given a card with a fictional piece of gossip on it - essentially a secret crime - and the goal is to figure out who has what card. Each time the boat puts into port, the game master (played by James Coburn, who's character is obsessed with games and has tons of them scattered around the boat) goes to shore, and sets up a puzzle that reveals who holds one of the cards. He then comes back to get his six guests and all go ashore. The six players must thing figure out his puzzle, which, when solved, tells who holds that night's card. The game is scored by giving one "point" to each person who figures out who holds each night's card before the person who actually holds the card shows up. Players who arrive after that receive no points.

The "kinda three" puzzle is the murder mystery, and it's a pretty good one. In the first few minutes, a girl is killed and a year later nobody has yet figured whodunnit. All the clues are given to the viewer and if the right deductions are made, said viewer can solve the murder logically without having to resort to intuition. A lot of detail and thought was put into the mystery and was therefore satisfying. I was impressed how some things that I marked down as continuity errors actually turned out to be clues that could have used to solve the mystery.

I must admit I was looking forward to following a trail of all six puzzles and the dénouement was a little disappointing, but it was a really good, intelligent film. I really wonder if something like it could get made today as it seems like the murder/mystery been pretty much relegated to TV.