Hide And Seek In Cyberspace

A puzzle that remained unanswered for more than 14 years has now been solved, thanks to technological leaps in image searching

- Aleks Krotoski

Since 2008, I’ve been trying to track down a man on the other side of the world named Satoshi. I’m not a creeper, I swear. I’m a journalist.

During the first decade of the millennium, my beat was computer games. Over my tenure, games evolved away from home consoles to weird and wonderful immersive, interactive experiences that became interlaced with the rest of our lives through the power of the internet. The most exciting were alternate reality games (ARGs), where designers created complex worlds using information already out there, or that they planted there, intertwined with codes flashed at the end of television shows, placed in magazines, or heard down the line of a public phone. The whole world could be the game board, and that made everything a bit more sparkly.