An Archive Site for Get-a-Clue 2000 Documentation
Impatient? Skip the intro and other verbiage and go directly to:
An Archive Site for Get-a-Clue 2000 Documentation
Impatient? Skip the intro and other verbiage and go directly to:
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The last time I checked, the old site is still up, so for now some of this information is unnecessarily duplicated (or triplicated), but I figured I needed to get these documents onto a web space that I controlled, just in case. It would be a shame to lose something like the Scooby Group Dynamics. For as long as you can find it, the official Get-a-Clue 2000 web site is located here. Many thanks to Dan Geist for providing that space to us, and for his continued administration of polter.net.
Hey, just who won back in 2000 anyway?
How to assemble a competitive Get-a-Clue Team
Originally posted March 6, 2000. This information was also found
in the OHDaMN, as the last two articles of the reference section entitled
"Getting Along with the Other People on Your Team". This includes
the unintentionally funny group dynamics section featuring the Scooby gang.
What is Get-a-Clue, and how do I play?
Originally posted March 25, 2000. An overview of the game for
beginners. Not all that bad, as these things go.
How to mentally prepare yourself for Get-a-Clue
2000
Originally posted March 29, 2000.
A personal checklist of stuff to bring
Originally posted April 2, 2000.
How this year's game is different
Originally posted April 12, 2000.
In my own opinion, which is understandably biased, I think the idea of a Get-a-Clue game manual was a stroke of pure genius on the part of Game Control. It marked one of the few real innovations to the game that we were able to implement during our tenure. We will see if future members of Game Control will try their hand at a similar effort.
This archive does not include every page or section of the OHDaMN. Some sections of the OHDaMN were derived from other sources, so where applicable I am giving you a link to the site where we ourselves obtained the pertinent information. While a good chunk of the manual is original text, we also had to include info that in itself is as common as dirt, but which was needed to make the manual complete. You can go look up the Greek alphabet yourself, for example, so I'm not reproducing it again here. Links are provided for some of the missing material, but not all. Finally, some parts of the OHDaMN were thrown in at the last minute because they seemed funny at the time. I am trying to include as many of this last sort as possible, but you will need to give me some time to format and upload the suckers.
I have also tried to preface most of the articles with some "behind-the-scenes"
information. Now you too will know about all the inside jokes, the
defunct clue ideas, the false trails, and the general zaniness.
An Annotated Table of Contents:
Game Documentation:
Editorial Note: this long and rather wordy section of the manual was intended to be camouflage, hiding any number of vital but "secret" pieces of information that would be required to solve a number of clues during the game. Almost universally, however, the clue ideas that were supposed to tie-in with the manual were never implemented . In some cases the information was left in place, while in other situations we inserted new jokes (like my free beers) because the opportunity provided was just too good to pass up. People have since complained to me that the OHDaMN was merely an overly complex red herring, a massive piece of misdirection that had nothing at all to do with Get-a-Clue. Well, that's true, but the accusation is misplaced: the manual is fine, and there were hints for clues on nearly every page -- it's just that these are for missing clues. Only after the game reached its final form did so much of the manual end up being confusing and misleading.Reference Section One: DrivingCircular Reference: Table of Contents The End Loser License Agreement The Game Introduction The Official Rules Stuff You Should Have Brought With You A Glossary of Terms
"One very important aspect of Get-a-Clue 2000 is the fact that you must drive the course in order to play the game. To assist you in this, we are providing materials on driving, assembled from various authoritative sources. Please note that some of the information is technical in nature, and for the purposes of discussion one or more articles may refer to driving speeds that would of course be unsafe under normal conditions. Please use your best judgment in determining how to use this information."Reference Section Two: What to SeeDriver Checklist The Interstate Highway System How to Drive Fast and Safely by Bob Holt Selections from "The Physics of Racing" by Brian Breckman Off-Road Driving Guidelines for 4WD
"Oh No! Uncle Fred and Aunt Alice are visiting Atlanta with those two brats of theirs! While you'd rather go someplace (anyplace) for a couple of weeks rather than deal with relatives, you already got the call from Mom telling you to be nice and play 'tour guide' for the 16+ days that they are going to be here. Maybe you can pretend that you're dead when they stop by the house. Most of you playing today's game are either natives to the Atlanta area or have been living here long enough that you have a good idea which places are best avoided by all but tourists. Of course, every now and then you have to deal with relatives (or freshmen, or pre-frosh, or maybe even someone you like) who want to go to exactly those places. And of course, the evil people on Game Control have been known to pick a few tourist traps as clue sites on occasion... So whether you're entertaining friends from out of town, looking for something to do in between clue sites, or analyzing the Game manual for subtle hints on where to go next, you will probably be interested in the following list."Reference Section Three: Where to EatTourist Traps and Other Things to Do and See
"Ah... the sun has just set on another beautiful spring day. You've worked hard, you've played hard, you're bushed. You have gone out and seized the day so hard it's still huddled over there in the corner, whimpering softly and avoiding eye contact with anyone on your team. You'd like nothing better than to sit down to a nice home-cooked meal, followed by some TV while you suck back a few cold ones, until you fall asleep on the couch. But Game Control just told you (while snickering into the phone) that you are only halfway through the game, you poor bastard. So, since you have to stop and work on this next clue anyway, why don't you take a break and grab dinner at the same time? Since we at Game Control know that you will likely need to stop for lunch, dinner, and possibly breakfast, we thought it would be nice to include a section in the OHDaMN on some of the fine dining establishments in the metro Atlanta area. Ideally we would have a staff of people, professional writers and culinary affectionados, to go to the majority of restaurants in our fair city, and from the sum of their impressions and experiences we could compile a list of those nice, slightly eccentric, out-of-the-way places you might have missed before but which are definitely worth your attention. Unfortunately, we do not live in an ideal world. Instead of a large staff of food critics, we have Matt. And that tends to skew the results a bit..."Reference Section Four: Getting Along with the Other People on Your TeamAtlanta Restaurant Reviews
"Get-a-Clue is a game that can take hours, and it is not exactly low stress: traffic, frustrating clues, unclear clues, unfair clues, those bastards at Game Control... You're trapped in a car with four or five other people for a whole day, with no time-outs while stuck in traffic -- the situation would be close to impossible under normal conditions, to say nothing about how you will deal with the extra stress of playing Get-a-Clue at the same time. We at Game Control are cognizant of these problems, and present the following articles to help you get along with you teammates. Hopefully, if you find yourself in the middle of some sort of team-related conflict, these suggestions will help you find your way back to normalcy. Please be aware, however, that we have no way of anticipating all of the problems you could run into, so if you run into a situation not covered here, just stay calm and tell yourself, 'This will make a great story when we look back on it later.' That or you'll kill each other. I'd say the odds are 50/50, either way."Reference Section Five: Some fun things to read during the long trip aheadTeam Work Peacemaking and Conflict Resolution Anger Management Assembling Your Team Group Dynamics
"For those of you carefully reading the entire manual up to this point, you have probably been disappointed. It has been pretty dry going so far. For the most part, what was written above was exactly what it appeared to be. We started some months ago and set out to write a comprehensive manual on Get-a-Clue, so we had to include stuff on driving and getting along with your team mates, as well as more mundane stuff like where to have lunch. And for teams with time to kill (because they don't really want to win) we also listed some fun places to visit during the game to help you break the monotony. Oh, sure, of course we slipped in some weird stuff, some off-hand hints, and a few blatant markers, but you expected to see that. In fact, if you hadn't found any hints or markers along the way you would have worried that you were missing something. From this point on in, though, the whole editorial philosophy has changed. We now follow no directing principle. The rest of the manual is a collection of neat articles, tables, trivia, history, maps, figures, and all the other crap that you probably expected to find in your game packet. Here it is, stuck at the end of the Game Manual. Odds are good that there is some information here that you will need at some point to solve a clue. Odds are also good that you will need to sift through a lot of dross to find those nuggets of information. The editorial staff has tried to liven things up a bit, though, so that maybe while you are being informed (or grossly misled) you will be entertained at the same time. Hopefully you will get a few chuckles out of this stuff. And in that vein, we now present:"Top Ten List The Greek Alphabet The Metric System Rocket Science Common Ions Georgia Tech Campus Map Blues Brothers Drinking Game Bill and Ted's Most Excellent Drinking Game A Brief History of Cryptography by Emily Eaton The Beer Economy 1998 Georgia Census Data Sol-fa: Musical Syllables and Where They Came From Green Spaces A photocopy of page 168 This Page Intentionally Left Blank
Get-a-Clue 2000: A Briefcase Full of Clues was planned and executed by Team Blues, consisting primarily of:
Capain:
Todd Lyman a.k.a. Jake Blues
Members:
Joel Eaton a.k.a. Elwood Blues
Emily Eaton
Matt Blind
John Securda
Bob Holt
Matt McCullough
Wendy McCullough
Josh Reddick
Team Blues would like to extend our Special Thanks to our game testers:
Jen Dunbar, Casey Kraus, Kelly Kepes, and others including various
family members.
The Official Get-a-Clue 2000 web site (which was located here, go check) was written largely by Bob Holt, with contributions from Todd Lyman and significant progamming assistance from Josh Reddick and Joel Eaton. Oh yeah, and the crap I wrote. Bob put that stuff into HTML for me, so I won't take credit.
The Official Handbook, Documentation, and Materials Notebook (or OHDaMN) for Get-a-Clue 2000 was compiled and edited by Matt Blind (that's me) with significant help from Todd Lyman (who converted much of The Physics of Racing from html-and-images to plain text), and Bob Holt (who in addition to the article cited also contributed greatly to the Glossary and the List of Stuff to Bring).
In addition to my editorial duties, I also ended up writing a good bit of the material, though I should admit that my contribution is in fact a bit less than half of the total. If the manual doesn't specifically credit someone else, then you can assume I wrote it. With that said, however, I really should thank those individuals who did contribute, voluntarily or otherwise.
Contribuing Members of Team Blues:
Copyright 2000
Matthew Blind and
Team Blues: Get-a-Clue 2000 Game Control