I’m glad you’re interested and I’m happy to help! Cipher Hunt was an international scavenger hunt/alternate reality game put on by Alex Hirsch, the creator of Gravity Falls. after the credits of the Gravity Falls series finale, a moment of live footage plays:
the footage was of an apparently real statue Alex had hidden somewhere in the world. Cipher Hunt was about finding that statue (and the treasure buried at it’s feet)—but it was also about a community of passionate fans working together towards a common goal. it was a fun and strange thing, with the thrill you’d expect from a global ARG full of coded messages and riddles, but just as surreal—and haunted by a sense of sentimentality and nostalgia that bloomed at the end.
the hunt took two weeks, coordinated by fans online who then moved to the real world to retrieve Alex’s clues, which included a jar of fake eyeballs in a tourist trap gift shop accessed by giving a password to the cashier, a final clue so difficult it took an entire week and a hint from Alex for fans to solve, and, infamously, a 2000-piece jigsaw puzzle. a great place to get the short, sweet, organized story of Cipher Hunt is the Gravity Falls wiki page, which has a wealth of links and sources—I highly recommend reading this article! and as well: Alex encouraged fans who searched for clues to Periscope their searches so that fans around the globe could, in a sense, participate as well. when you read over the wiki page, keep in mind that many of the searches for each clue were captured by live video feeds that fans could tune into, as if they were there searching, too.
as for my own role: after seeing that initial tweet and the first clue from Alex on twitter, I lurked in the hashtag prompted by Alex as fans began decoding text and solving riddles to get real-world locations. fans then went to those locations to find the next physical clue—all around the world. the first clue was found in Russia, then Japan, then the US, over the course of a few hours. totally entranced, I followed along on twitter and posted about the hunt on tumblr.
those posts slowly gained more notes, and I gained more followers. a few folks messaged me saying my blog was the only way they were able to keep up with the event. they thanked me for posting in a readable, organized way, so I kept up my reporting, providing accurate, to-the-minute updates on the progress of the hunt, as well as longer summaries of each day or important development. once the final clue was found and fans were tasked with deciphering it to finally locate the statue, I also took suggestions from tumblr users to a private discord chat where a group of focused fans worked to solve the last clue.
those posts are still up on my blog. you can see all of them or read just the summary posts. the statue was moved after it was found, so I wrote a post on where it went and how it got there, as well as a post on how to get to the statue for fans who might want to visit.
as for my experience…I was moved by the event itself, to say the least. the hunt was totally unaffiliated with Disney, Hirsch had included his own souvenirs from working on the show in the treasure box buried by the statue, and a few of the clue locations were places not just linked to the series, but were important to Hirsch as well—I think about all that a lot. the ephemerality of the event—the fact that you, anon, cannot experience Cipher Hunt for yourself, because it happened in the past and there’s no way to go back to it—is also something I still think about. a lot.
and of course I was touched that my posts about the hunt were helpful to fans. I still have messages in my inbox from folks saying they felt they had participated in the event themselves thanks to the work I did. I think about that most of all.
somewhere in the woods 