6.14 A Letter to the Prince of Kong
by Adam R. Wood, based on a concept by Bowen Kerins
Special thanks to David Nelson of Twin Galaxies
ANSWER: ISCI
The phrase "The Official Electronic Scoreboard" is the tagline for Twin Galaxies (TG), the videogame world-record tracking organization. Throughout the first three paragraphs are a series of TG scores for classic arcade games; enough hints are provided to determine the games' names, allowing the scores to be looked up in their appropriate TG database track. Here are the positions of the scores as they were at the time of the Hunt:
Score | Game title | Position |
---|---|---|
1,462,100 | Quartet | 1st place |
195,150 | Turkey Shoot | 2nd place |
10,774,191 | Centipede (marathon) | 5th place |
1,050,200 | Donkey Kong (hammer allowed) | 1st place |
75,710 | Spectar | 3rd place |
66,140 | Spectar | 6th place |
24,260 | Red Alert | 1st place |
4,140 | Depthcharge | 6th place |
1,494,500 | Heavy Barrel | 1st place |
361,400 | Legendary Wings | 2nd place |
999,990 | Circus Charlie | 1st place |
1,646,100 | Contra (non-grandfathered) | 2nd place |
754,400 | Kangaroo (marathon) | 3rd place |
473,400 | Donkey Kong 3 (tournament) | 1st place |
The final paragraph details the answer extraction: indexing into the title of each game by the position of its score and grouping the results by paragraph spells 'QUID EARCH ECOND'; the "three initials" missing from these words are all the addressee's initial ('S' for Steve), yielding 'SQUID SEARCH SECOND'. Searching the TG database revealed this fictional track the author added just for the Hunt:
The name of the second-place scorer, pronounced phonetically, is the final instruction: "call in ISCI". (ISCI is a type of code used in commercial broadcasting, hence the "advertising" remark in the flavortext.)
TG was founded in 1981, the year of the first Hunt.
Several references - including the title - are made to the 2007 film The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. All are red herrings, although Steve (Wiebe, the film's protagonist) and the author do appear together in the film. None of the people or events mentioned in the letter are fictional.
The non-existent game Squid Search is an inside joke at TG. In its original form, it was used to weed out untrustworthy affiliates; later on, TG founder Walter Day (hence the first-place "Knight") would assign scores to those who assisted the classic-videogaming hobby but were not competitive gamers themselves. The author intended to use that original track for the puzzle, but it was absent from the TG database at the time of the Hunt, so he improvised. Search the TG database for "marriage" to find the only other non-game it lists.