The Xbox Puzzle 

I fucking hate you dad

omfg Dad my Xbox just got the red ring of death! I've never been so happy!

LmAo

you have exactly 360 likes. leave it at at that.

MyMrsamsam your sons gonna be devastated

Yeah, same. Especially the one at the top, with the Philips head. If I noticed it was different, I doubt my first thought would be "let's connect this random screw to that other one with a metal wire". I would've unscrewed it and probably consequently broken the whole thing.

Than it would explode

Marquis Puzzle solved!!!!

+

I will hack saw it...

T Fox yep.... hilarious.

It's so anti-ironic!

That’s the joke

Yeah. I thought the box was going to open up and reveal something. Whats in the box?? Electronics I guess.

It's literally a perfect circle back to it being called the Xbox. Take a joke.

dulcet le reddit army exdeeeeee zdxdddd

well that seems right if you ever owned a first generation xbox 360....

Reminded me of the movie A Christmas Story when he gets his decoder ring and all it says is," Be sure to drink your Ovaltine"

If you google, you lose anyways. Outside help or influence counts as clues for a puzzle that is meant for you to solve alone.

Btw to give meaning to what I said... try to solve this box as a person living in the 1800's before google or even the internet was a thing...

if only everyone had cooler more elevated tastes like yours :(

You are reddit.

then a schlami shows up... and he spits on it

woah dude you are so unique with your crazy amazing taste in very obscure shows that you like to make constant references to!!!!!! wow!!!!!

Wubalubadubdub am I right ?!

Nothin runs crysis

Anything can play crysis, but nothing can play crysis 3

hipnotyq 😂😂

Give it to your sister. Slap her face then shout at her. It will then *run* *cry* *sis*. (Not in that order) Sorry.

Crecross Official no it doesnt u console peasent crysis is PC exclusive

People who enjoy puzzles typically have good problem solving skills.

Telekinesis=turn the box upside down? This reminds me of the old adventure games in the 80s where you'd have to know to do things like "To unlock the door you have to put the pink rock in your pocket while standing in front of the window" Huh?

Yeah, the others made some sense, but that one didn't make any sense at all.

As mentioned in the video, it was designed to be solved with four people.

You Google the solution.

sum moner kek

What? No! She's married to me! That means she is not single!

It was a joke, dude, chill. lol.

FLEB you guys getting along or...?

FLEB Judging by your answer, i kinda doubt that you solved that puzzle yourself... Do you really think that someone would seriously ask you if your WIFE is single? Especially, when you take in consideration that this joke has been around for years...

John S lol

You deserve an oscar for this comment.

That's why you get a PS4 instead.

PC

There's some electronics inside

We know there are electronics inside... the point of a traditional puzzle box was that uh... there was something in there as a reward for solving the puzzle.

youtubasoarus But this is not a traditional puzzle, now is it?

Pengajim I was one comment above this until the end... wtf

carmine pls, go make more game of thrones videos, get to work man

Smessies I JUST MADE ONE. GET OFF MAH BACK DAWG

Thanks!

WELL THEN MAKE ANOTHER, DUDE.

Tsar Nicholas fiiiine

I think there is a different mapping for every letter, since you can see BOX -> OXB

Are you me?

Come play with me kitttties

No you are meow... sorry

Mrow?

I love how all of your profile pics are just the first letter of your username!

You can get pretty far using guesswork, trial-and-error, and patterns. The first things I would've done are probably look for 1-3 letter words (a, of, the, and so on), and also try to figure out which letter corresponds to E. It's possible that the key could just be a rot cipher (every letter gets moved forward/backward a certain amount of "spaces"), which would make it easier, but otherwise you just have to grind away.

I was hoping there was some kind of marking on the box to kind of help (outside of the letters themselves) I see what you're getting at though and deductive reasoning is likely what most people would use to establish it....just hoped for a short cut or explanation :)

Check out cryptograms. They're a word puzzle that you commonly see in newspapers next to crosswords (I assume anyway. I haven't used a newspaper in a while). Basically, as long as the sentences is long enough, you can figure out most cryptograms. You start with the small words, like the other guy said, and then you can usually work out the rest from there. They're pretty fun if you like puzzles and such.

you can figure out how frequently certain letters appear and then pair those letters with the letters in the English language that occur the same number of times. for example, e is the most common letter in the English language. if you figure out which letter occurs most often in the cipher text it is probably the letter that corresponds to e.

Thank you!!!

I'm thinking the same thing!

Matthew McCloskey Looks to be a fairly easy letter swap. Just write down A to Z and take note of letters which appear most often, these are your vowels. WZ and FX are both shown, there aren't many two letter words W appears quite a bit as does X, W equals I and X equals O. From there it's just a matter of subsituting the letters you do know into the puzzle and forming words as you go to reveal more letters, which in turn reveal more letters etc.

What if it isn't in English? :O

aur3nnnn He said at the very start it's in English.

People here have gotten somewhat of the right approach. First, remember that this was a puzzle event with multiple people teams, so we were all trying to solve it. A lot of techniques are shown here: www.cryptograms.org/tutorial.php A combination of one letter words, two letter words, and three letter words got us a lot of the letters, and then we were able to guess some of the bigger words. Eventually we started trying to translate the names, got that they were xmen, and got a lot more of the key.

u mean anti-orgasmic? \_(ツ)_/¯

¯\(ツ)/

(i~i)

When Trap Music Now shows up on a puzzle vid xD

Stop

"The Red Ring of Death". It the context of this event, we were looking for something that would destroy the Xbox. That works!

FLEB haha great, love your videos! :)

Thank you very much!

He's an Xman not a Fantastic Man.

Thanks! I saw this comment before the person on Reddit posted the video, and I really appreciated your comment at the time. It took a while, but I found it! Happy puzzling!

Just for clarification, I also appreciate your comment now.

ninjastarforcex Google "Xbox red ring of death"

ninjastarforcex its also fitting that the hardest letter to get is the "O". (it just furthers the red ring of death because when the letter appears its red)

On the video game console called the X-Box 360, the "red ring of death" is a visual error on the exterior of the main console that indicates some certain conditions. The ring is a lit-up circle with four quadrants, and each quadrant that is lit up as green normally represents a player or game-controller connected to the system. If there is a red quadrant, it means there is some problem with that corresponding controller or internally with the system that prevents further play, but all four quadrants lit up red (making a red ring) generally mean there is a system error or some other fatal condition that can't be remedied without taking the console in for repair.

that's too similar to magneto's side

I did in the original event with my puzzle team. This is from a puzzle event back in 2013 where you had to try out to be allowed to play and they only took 24 teams. For filming this video, I remembered a lot of the solve path from that original event.

Well great job. I just saw this vid made the front page of reddit, so it looks like you'll have an audience for months and years to come!

Very anti-claimactic

Travis Plofsky haha

This is very interesting! I will be taking a look at this in detail soon and seeing if it works. I want to check the circuits. Edit: This looks legit.

SAME

That's absolutely something key to puzzle design. The line for what constitutes too much is entirely dependent on context. I've designed for events for beginners up to what amounts to the world championship of puzzles. For the beginner events, you have to have clues to every step and hint vigorously. For the world championships, you can basically do whatever you like, as long as all the necessary information is present in the puzzle. (Internet is fine for most puzzle events.) Is there a particular event or puzzle you're thinking about?

I did an "escape the room" event in LA and one of the puzzles required a set of Allen keys to finish. We weren't given any, nor brought one so it was impossible to solve. I assume the employees forgot to include them on our run, but it put a sour taste in my mouth. Watching your videos brings up the question of how different regions and challenge levels make different assumptions about the solver's prior experience/access to tools.

I think it's ridiculous to assume you would have outside tools and I hope that was a mistake. Different regions definitely make different assumptions, but not to that extent. (Major regions for puzzle design are east coast US, west coast US, and Australia.)