Solution
Thank you so much to everyone who participated in the Luddy LLC's first ever Mega Puzzle. We are astounded by how many people solved the many difficult puzzles we created. If you have any suggestions to improve the Mega Puzzle, please message one of the puzzle masters so that we can ensure that any future Mega Puzzles can be even better!
Tetris
Each Tetris piece can be translated to letters by how they are named in the game. This site explains it well. You then choose the tetris pieces in the image by going left-to-right top-to-bottom and shift each letter by 12 using a Caesar decrypter to find the answer which is FLUXVALVE
Frogger
This puzzle was simple and "borrowed" from Spock's Mega Puzzle. All you had to do was open the image using Notepad or another text editor and search for "the answer to this puzzle".
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Beatmania
All of these songs are objectively amazing. The rickroll was added to make identifying the songs even harder >:)
The songs were: Pursuit of Happiness (Kid Cudi), Need You Tonight (INXS), Don't Look Back in Anger (Oasis), Everlong (Foo Fighters), Under Pressure (Queen and David Bowie), No Surprises (Radiohead), Umbrella (Rhianna), Say it Right (Nelly Furtado), Ice Ice Baby (Vanilla Ice), Rhinestone Eyes (Gorillaz), Cardigan (Taylor Switf), Enjoy the Silence (Depeche mode), Redbone (Childish Gambino), Roxanne (The Police), There is a Light That Never Goes Out (The Smiths), Time (Pink Floyd), Earfquake (Tyler the Creator), Immigrant Song (Led Zepplin).
The note told you the order of the songs by abbreviating the names of the artists. Tsw -> Taylor Swift
Then taking the first letter of each song yielded: IUCURRENTPRESIDENT. The current IU president is: PAMELAWHITTEN
I Robot
For this puzzle, you had to first realize that the i.robot file was actually a blender file. Then by opening the model in Blender, you would find an eye with many words written on it. One of these words which can by viewed by looking above the eye in a diagonal way was DOODLE
Quantum
By looking at the JPEG meta data, you would find the following link: https://arcarc.xmission.com/PDF_Arcade_Atari_Kee/Quantum/Quantum_CO-221-01_1st_Printing.pdf. Then, You would find the RGB values for each color and see that they all are divisible by 32. This would leave you with 12 sets of 3 numbers: Page, Line, Character (beggining at 0). Using that and the pdf, you would find the twelve characters that spell out: UNDER HANDED
Mario
The video cuts out 14 times and cuts out a specific word. Finding those 14 words and take the first letter to get: READNEWSLETTER. By reading the LLC Spring newsletter and looking under the Mega Puzzle section, you would find the answer which was QUIRKYDRAGON
Tempest
This puzzle was also inspired by Spock's Mega Puzzle. For this puzzle, you had to first convert each hexadecimal error code into binary and stack the three codes on top of each other. Then, using the clue to "feel the error" you would convert that binary to braille by replacing the ones with dots and zeros with empty spaces. That braille spelled out GOTOSLASHFREDLUDDYSERVICENOW. By typing the extension fredluddysurvicenow into the tempest url, you would be brought to a page which told you the answer was ERNIEPYLE
Pacman
This puzzle wasn't too difficult once you understood what was going on. You had to convert the dots to binary by having each dot be a one and each empty spot be a zero. Converting that binary to ASCII yielded THEENDISNEVERTHEEND
Galaga
The highscore was 2145441. Using this, you would first skip the first two letters and get E, then skip the next letter to get C, then skip the next 4 to get T, and so on until you got ECTOPIC
Tic Tac Toe
For this puzzle you just had to find the best next move, and take the letter written on that spot to spell out TACIT
Donkey Kong
This puzzle was another simple one. You had to take the colors of each platform top-to-bottom, find what the Hex color code of that color was, and take the first letter of that color code to get DEFACE
Double Dragon
For this puzzle, you just had to find all the pairs of repeated letters, then unscramble to get the answer which was VACATION (you had to realize that there were two pairs of repeated a's)
Mortal Kombat
This one was very simple. The three images in the foreground were back, back, low punch. The image in the background was smoke. This led you to find the name of Smoke's back, back, low punch combo which was SPEAR
Zelda
The words and music in the puzzle corresponded to the Ancient Song from Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild. Except, some words were incorrect. You had to take those incorrect words to get the message "sites google com iu edu text adventure game jam raw text". This is a link to a google sites sites.google.com/iu.edu/text-adventure-game-jam/raw-text. Which had the answer which is PEANUTBUTTERBISCUIT
Punch Out
Each of the enemies' dialog is a riddle. You had to find the answer to that riddle, then use the index of each A in the enemies' names which corresponded to which letters from the riddles' answers you needed to use to get the answer which is POTATOES
Centipede
First, you had to solve the KenKen puzzle to find which numbers corresponded to each color. Then the ordered pairs beneath the puzzle corresponeded to a book cipher which told you which word to get from which line. Ex. (1,5) was Line 1 word 5. This would give you the message "Data Structure With Key Value Pairs" which is a HASHTABLE (not dictionary you python brained losers)
Missile Command
Solving each of these math puzzles would give you a single integer number between 1 and 26. Using the letters which correspond to each of those numbers, you'd get the answer which is APHANITIC
Pong
This puzzle involved morse code. The fast gifs represented a dot and the slow gifs represented a dash. Using this you would get the answer which is HELLOWORLD
Basic Math
For this puzzle, you had to find the roots of each polynomial. There you would see that some roots were never used. Finding the letters which corresponeded to those roots and unscrambling, you would get ZIPLOCK
Word Zapper
This puzzle involved sets. You had to find the word which describes the image and convert that into a set of letters. The U symbol represents union and the \ represents exclusion. Using those set operations, you would get the secret message which is "IUSTUDENTNEWSPAPER" which is the INDIANADAILYSTUDENT
Joust
This puzzle was just a simple crossword. You had to find all the words and then unscramble the letters that were in the gray boxes which gave the answer of GLACIER
Q*bert
For this puzzle, you had to find the names of each of the fonts used in the paragraph. Then, stack them on top of each other in 3 separate piles (corresponding to the Q*bert images above). Then, following the path that Q*bert was making, starting in the middle, you would find the letters that you needed which spelled out NELLIESTETER
Field Day
This was easily the hardest puzzle of the lot. The examples are provided to help you find the pattern to solve the puzzle. What you had to do was take the Japanese characters of the page title, find the number of strokes needed to write those characters, convert that number sequence to unicode UTF-16, then get the pronunciation of the unicode characters. That would be the first part of the answer, then the second part would be the translation of the final Japanese character.
Japanese Characters: 表彰式
Strokes: 8, 14, 6 -> 8146
Unicode: \u8146 -> 腆
Pronunciation of unicode: 腆 -> ‘ten’ (てん)
Get Translation of Last Kanji: 式 -> Style
Ten, Style -> TenStyle
Gauntlet
Simple profit optimization problem using simplex linear programming.
The answer was 14646 -> FOURTEENTHOUSANDSIXHUNDREDFORTYSIX
Sly Spy
Each sign gave you your distance to three separate cities in Europe, using those distances, you could triangulate your location. Then, following the path that you and your partner take, you would see that the path outlines an eye. You know that you should meetup back in England. England + Eye = London Eye. The London Eye is a type of structure known commonly as a FERRISWHEEL
Polybius
This puzzle required the answers to all the previous puzzles. As one of the hints suggested, you would need to use a Polybius cipher to solve this puzzle. Polybius ciphers involve putting letters into a 5x5 grid then using coordinates (row, column) to spell out the hidden message.
The numbers at the bottom of each puzzle page told you the index of the letter you would need to use from the solution, then the "timely" hint told you to put the letters into your grid in order of the games' release date. You should note that each puzzle page used graphics and images from the earliest arcade version of the game which hinted at the fact that you should use the arcade release date as the release date.
Using your newly created Polybius grid and the pairs of numbers, you would find that the secret message is ADVENTUREEASTEREGGSCREENSHOT. Revealing that the answer to the Mega Puzzle was:
