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.

What Sondheim did for Bernstein

Speaking of unverified web anecdotes, Sondheim Factoids claims:

He invented an elaborate game for Leonard Bernstein's 50th Birthday called The Great Conductor Hunt.

I'm thinking if I ever have a free moment (ha!), I may want to sit down and write Mr. Sondheim a letter (on real paper!) and ask more about the history of these hunts of his.

Sondheim and Perkin's Game: The Details!

A reader pointed out earlier that the story about Stephen Sondheim's mother giving a clued cake to players seemed unlikely due to the bad blood between the two. My source for the story stated that he could no longer find where he heard the story. However, after a lot of searching, I found it!

The New Yorker ran an article on March 8th 1993 which they have recently posted in their online edition. [Puzzalot note: It no longer appears to be online.] ‘Stephen Sondheim's most famous game took place in Manhattan on Halloween, 1968. It required twenty people (preferably young theatre Turks like Herbert Ross, Nora Kaye, Lee Remick, Mary Rodgers, and Roddy McDowall), four limousines, complicated maps full of numbers and arrows, and a sack of perplexing props: scissors, bits of string, pins. Each team of five had to drive to a spot designated on the map, and there they would find a clue telling them where to go next; the trouble was, the clues were numbers, and there was no way of knowing how they might be revealed. One destination was a bustling bowling alley in which the last lane was curiously empty; there stood a single enigmatic pin, which you had to bowl over in such a way that you glimpsed the number written on the side. Another site proved to be nothing but a nondescript door with a mail slot. But if you stuck your ear near the slot, you could hear the faint voice of Frank Sinatra singing "One for My Baby" - which might still have stumped you unless you recognized that the lyric begins, "It's a quarter to three." A quarter to three: the number was 245. Then there was the vestibule of a brownstone, where a small elderly woman (actually, the mother of Anthony Perkins, Sondheim's fellow game designer) would beckon you upstairs for some coffee and a slice of cake. Those who actually ate the cake stood no chance of winning: the clue was drawn in the icing.

"That was one of the last of the big game parties," Sondheim says. "Toward the end of the sixties, beginning of the seventies, I don't know, it just stopped. Everybody outgrew them except me."’ - Deconstructing Sondheim, The Stephen Sondheim Society quoting the New Yorker

So it wasn't Sondheim's mother: It was Anthony Perkin's mother. How's that for spooky?

Before The Last of Sheila

The story so far: Joe Belfiore created the Game after being inspired by Midnight Madness, which was inspired by Don Luskin's Games from the 70s, which were inspired (at least "in part") by The Last of Sheila. So what inspired The Last of Sheila?

Tony Perkins and Steven Sondheim wrote [the film] and they were ardent game players in real life. If you went to their house, if you had dinner there, there was always a big, complicated type of game. It wasn't charades; it was a very complicated version of charades. There were puns... anyway, it was always complex and it tested you. Everything always tested you. So they wrote this script that is actually a game. - Richard Benjamin, commentary on The Last of Sheila

Pretty cool, except that it even goes beyond that.

The movie was inspired by an irregular series of elaborate, real-life scavenger hunts [Stephen] Sondheim and [Anthony] Perkins arranged for their show business friends . . . in Manhattan in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The climax of one hunt was staged in the lobby of a seedy flophouse, where participants heard a skipping LP record endlessly repeating the first line of the Harold Arlen/Johnny Mercer standard "One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)" ("It's quarter to three...") The winning team eventually recognized the clue -- 2:45 -- and immediately headed for room 245 of the hotel, where bottles of Champagne awaited them. - Wikipedia

So a composer and a Psycho actor held puzzle hunts! From what I can tell, Sondheim was the major driver, though.

There's a story about Stephen Sondheim's affinity for puzzles and puzzle hunts, such as one he threw where players had to visit this house hosted by an old lady (Stephen's mother). The lady would serve you cake, and if you ate it, you lost: there was a clue in the frosting. - Dan Sanderson, Brainlog

Where did his inspiration come from? Sondheim did have a facination with puzzles: He wrote crosswords for the New York magazine, and is considered to be the one who brought British-style cryptics to America. Perhaps he was inspired by other musicians?

I was brought up, you know, by Oscar Hammerstein in my early teens, and he liked anagrams, but it was the decorous kind. And then, when I met Leonard Bernstein, he and his family played cut-throat anagrams, and that's how I got into that. - Stephen Sondheim, Academy of Achievement Interview

I'd like to go back further, to find the true source of Sondheim's inspiration for puzzle hunts. There's a gap in what I can research, though, but the Game is a type of treasure hunt, which is generally considered to have been created by Elsa Maxwell:

[Elsa] is proud of having invented such games as Treasure Hunt and Scavenger Hunt, because of their psychological importance. Not unmindful of science (she once devoted most of a column to the fact that she has never had to blow her nose), she says: "Let's break them down scientifically. In the Treasure Hunt . . . intellectual men were paired off with great beauties, glamor with talent. In the course of the nights escapades anything could happen." - Time Magazine, Elsa at War

I can't seem to nail down when she "invented" the treasure hunt, but I can make an educated guess as to what might have inspired her. Going all the way back to 1881:

Though it's not where the premise first appeared, Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island was instrumental in planting the treasure map concept in the popular consciousness. - Cecil Adams, The Straight Dope on Pirate Treasures

Attempting to solve Luskin's "High-Speed Telescopic Evidence"

I figure "If red ran thy troubled waters?" is a cryptic clue of sorts and whatever it was would end up being a book of the Bible and would work in conjunction with "5:10" to give a chapter and verse.

But I'm horrible at cryptics. "If red ran" = pink? Troubled "waters" = rawest? Although raw meat is kind of pink, probably not. Maybe "If red ran thy" troubled = fire hydrant? A fire hyrant uses a hose to "water" fires... "a hose" = Hosea? Hosea 5:10 (RS) reads:

The princes of Judah have become
like those who remove the landmark;
upon them I will pour out
my wrath like water.

Interesting, since I'm probably looking for a landmark and it does have the water connection. But then what? Is there a landmark at the corner of Prince and Judah? A fountain, maybe?

Newspaper Clippings from Early Games

Following Larry's lead, I asked y2kbozo if s/he could send me the clippings mentioned in the post. A little while later, y2kbozo sent me a zip file with newspaper clippings, invites, and even a clue from the first four Games. I've put all that was sent up in the gallery and some samples below.

An LA Times column detailing the events of the first Game in 1973.	An invite to Game 2 from 1975, with recommended equipment.	An invite to Game 3: 7878 (guess the date) offering a "neon sculpture" as a prize.
Four clippings from an in-depth LA Times story about Game 3. I think this is the article that inspired Midnight Madness.	An invite to Game 4 in 1979, which apparently had a "solving guide" available.	A clue entitled "High-Speed Telescopic Evidence" from an unknown Game.

Perusing these files reveals that the first Game was in 1973 and was at least partially inspired by The Last of Sheila (*adds to top of Netflix queue*). Most of the puzzles seemed to have consisted of cryptic-ish clues; it wasn't until Game III: 7878 that things clues became a little more varied (and thus higher priced).

All in all, some very interesting history.