Perplex City at BBC'S Radio 1 Big Weekend

The Third Power, villains from the Perplex City alternate reality game, are set to test their subliminal messaging technology at Radio 1's Big Weekend, hosted by BBC Radio 1 on May 19th and 20th. Can you solve the puzzles in time to get free festival tickets and stop the promised "neural overrides"?

Violet recaps the build-up on her blog:

Having followed a lead which started with my upstairs neighbour complaining about delays in the postal service, we discovered that the mail from the shadowy Apolyton Institute was being tampered with ... we know that someone from Apolyton sent Cyrus [of The Third Power] the plans for [an] extremely dangerous device. We don't know exactly what it does yet, but the words "neural override" don't make me feel warm all over. Part of what Cyrus is doing involves subliminal messaging: he's planning a huge test of this technology this coming weekend at a big music festival on Earth: Radio 1's Big Weekend. And like I say, an enormous crowd of people all having their neurons overridden... well, at the very least they're going to want their money back.

This is also the first merging of two separate alternate reality games (ARGs): Perplex City and Frozen Indigo Angel, which details a cover-up at the BBC involving those three words and the firing of Paul Denchfield, a producer for Radio 1's vodcasts. His blog has a number of vidcasts covering the events over the past few months, but only recently was the connection between the two games revealed:

In the BBC, I found a black-and-white board game. It turned out that the counters spelled out a web address in braille, leading us [to the secret files of the man behind the whole Frozen Indigo Angel project]. His name is Cyrus Quinton, and FIA is a subliminal messaging scheme building up to something huge at the Big Weekend ... Looks like Cyrus and the FIA technology come from Perplex City too, and Violet has a bit of a history with him.

How can you save the throngs of Big Weekend event-goers from a nefarious brain scrub? Masquerade as an agent of the The Third Power and solve the daily puzzles to receive festival tickets. Once there, keep an eye out for further instructions and how to meet up with the other moles... er, players. Fervent Perplex City players congregate at Perplexorum and you can get up-to-minute developments as they happen.