It Was a Very Good Year Trivia Quiz

Answer: Monopoly

Interestingly enough, all of the choices have been planned as feature films.

Your Rich Uncle Pennybags has just died, and he has decided to leave his fortune to the nephew of his who owns the most hotels. Your cousin, Alvin, already owns seven, and you have to make sure you are able to successfully build eight of your own.

The MIT Mystery Hunt is a puzzle hunt that takes place over Martin Luther King, Jr. Day weekend. It consists of solving puzzles that are very rarely provided with instructions that involve knowledge in just about every region of trivia you can think of. There have been puzzles based on Barbie, quantum mechanics, Bach cantatas, Garfield Minus Garfield, My Little Pony, African coins, Klingon, and many more! In each round, the puzzles all tie together in one larger metapuzzle, which you must solve in order to gain access to the next round. In the 2002 hunt, for instance, each of the round puzzles was a "house", and the metapuzzles, of which there were eight, one for each color, were "hotels".

My favorite puzzles from the 2002 hunt: Variations on a Theme, I Want My Mystery Hunt Puzzle!, The Commons, D2: The Mighty Duck Konundrum, and Land Grab.

Answer: The Matrix

The CEO of ACMECorp had actually been a pivotal character in the resistance movement fighting against the Matrix, and he was killed by the Agents to prevent an uprising. You, of course, have to gather resources and learn as much as you can before destroying the Matrix once and for all.

Thanks to some previously unexpected outside puzzles, the 2003 hunt ended up containing more than one hundred puzzles, more than any other previous Mystery Hunt.

My favorite puzzles from the 2003 hunt: Something in Common, Titles, Unprecedented Discovery, Lost in a Maze, Ordering a Round, Antiphony, Guys'll Eat Ivy, Too, Dictionary, Whoa-I Know Cartography!, Screening Room, Studio, and Cockpit.

Answer: Time Bandits

When investigating your first piratey island, a timehole opens up in front of you, and you find yourself transported to the Yukon in the late 1800s. Finding new puzzles and solving the corresponding metapuzzles allows you to find new timeholes and transport yourself to new locations and time periods. You end up on the Titanic, where you try to escape before the ship sinks.

My favorite puzzles from the 2004 hunt: IHS, Free Willy Wonka, Cross Your Eyes, In a Manner of Speaking, All Ages Too, Temple of Macuilxochitl, Snowfield, Girl, Lawman, There's No Accounting for Taste, and CQD.

Answer: Normalville

Of course, nothing is as simple as it initially appears. A freak meteor shower interrupts the ceremony, and it causes crime rates to suddenly skyrocket. Fortunately, this meteor shower just happens to give you and all of your teammates superpowers, and you have to go around the city, collect all of the meteorite fragments, and dispose of them accordingly.

My favorite puzzles from the 2005 hunt: Gag Me, Seven Days, Track 12, Vanna's Nightmare, Eoanthropus dawsoni, Number Two Pencil, Odd Man Out, D3: The Fellowship of the Duck, More Variations on a Theme, Word Play, 21 Equations to Solve, Jungle Beats, World Tour, Junk Mail, Logomania, and Ten Times a Minute.

Answer: Mission: Impossible

Yes, it's a terrible pun. Mr. E. Hunt, also known as Ethan Hunt from Mission: Impossible, is the head of your covert organization.

Your mission is to stop the evil Professor Moriarty, the head of the Evil Institute of Technology (E.I.T.) from plunging the world into an eternal ice age with his weather control machine. You must travel around the world and meet with other S.P.I.E.S. agents located in various cities.

My favorite puzzles from the 2006 hunt: Grid with a Hole in the Middle, Sound Quality, Spoiler Warning!, Mysterious Cry; Quiet Habit, Space Invaders, Denial, Xanadu, Dear Reader, Just a Jump to the Left, Wry, Ergo Dead, Fusion, Land That I Love, and Drop Everything.

Answer: The teams had sold their souls to the devil

The opening ceremony announced that there would be nearly 300 puzzles, one of which involved all of the hunters and a massive sudoku grid, but a man by the name of Michael Fauntleroy broke in and announced that the entire hunt would consist of only five puzzles if the teams would just sign a contract. Of course, upon finding the coin, teams would discover that the fine print on the contract mentioned the tiny little detail that their immortal souls now belonged to Michael Fauntleroy Stopheles (M.F. Stopheles, for short). To get their collective souls (no, not the band) back, they had to dive into Hell itself and learn how to be really, really evil in order to get close enough to M.F. to throw a snowball at him and claim their souls.

My favorite puzzles from the 2007 hunt: It Could Be Worse, The Continental DiViDe, Disco Inferno, Unscrambled Cable Porn [note: this puzzle does not actually contain pornography], The Sports Report, Killing the Audience, Pyramid Scheme, I Love These 80, When (Not) in Rome, Negative Ad Campaign, Flip Flop Ya Don't Stop, and Recounting Former Glories.

Answer: Dr. Awkward

Unfortunately, the proprietor of the 2008 Mystery Hunt, Dr. Awkward, was killed while setting the hunt up. Teams had to cull data from interviews with various suspects by famous detectives from popular culture, like Sherlock Hemlock.

My favorite puzzles from the 2008 hunt: World of Comics, Little Rascals, Subservient Chicken Loves the '80s, Magnetic Poetry, and Department Store.

Answer: Escape from Zyzzlvaria

In the year 3009, the board game Escape from Zyzzlvaria finally became a reality, and the characters from the game even showed up in person to present! Unfortunately, MIT was accidentally teleported into Zyzzlvaria, thousands of light years away. To get back, teams had to find the Covertly Operational Inversion Node, or COIN, located somewhere in Zyzzlvaria.

My favorite puzzles from the 2009 hunt: 99 Cents a Clue, Cheat Codes, The Hiigara Dome, Dual Singularities, Split Second Decisions, Cover Girls, and I'm Feeling a Little TwitterPetted.

Answer: The 1993 Monty Python and the Holy Grail hunt

Professor Emit had been experimenting with his newly invented Time Ray. Unfortunately, he chose to use the coin as one of his test subjects, and the subsequent bouncing around of the coin through time caused serious changes in the timestream, which resulted in the creation of never-before-seen Mystery Hunts all the way back to the year 1710. By building a time-jump detector and finding the coin, teams could manage to get the coin to settle in its correct and final hiding place, which would set the timestream back to normal.

My favorite puzzles from the 2010 hunt: The Zyzzlvarian Holovid Institute, 6.6 Doctor of Thinkology, Side by Side by Side, Picture Puzzle 2, Discword, Disappearing Act, Stick Man, Summonings, New and Improved, 4 = 2, Frritt-Flacc, Correspondence, Thirteen at Dinner, and Crossed Swords.

Answer: GLaDOS, from Portal

After working his way through Mega Man, The Legend of Zelda, Civilization, and Katamari Damacy, Mario enters the world of Portal. Of course, the portals were how Mario traveled between the video games in the first place. As it turns out, GLaDOS orchestrated the kidnapping in order to force Mario to solve a series of puzzles in order to find Princess Peach. Why? She loves forcing people to solve puzzles, of course! GLaDOS lets Mario escape after finding Princess Peach, but Peach won't leave without her new friend, the Weighted Companion Cube, so Mario must go on a runaround of MIT to find it.

My favorite puzzles from the 2011 hunt: Good Vibrations, The Cat's Meow, Soooo Cute!, Painted Potsherds, Puzzle Box, InventoryQuest, Plotlines, and Unlikely Situations.