Masquerade - Quest for the Golden Hare 40

This may not immediately seem relevant to the current DamonCarltonandaPolarBear.com poster reveals but please read on and you may change your mind.

In 1979 an Englishman called Kit Williams created a jewel encrusted, golden Hare, this was the prize for the person that discovered it's location. The hare was buried in a ceramic casket on public land in the shadow of a cross on a hill in England.

The clues to the location of the hare were contained in a story, published in a book released in 1979. The story is about Jack Hare who trys to carry a treasure from the Moon to her lover the Sun, however the treasure is lost on the way and the reader of the book is left to find the location.

Apart from this being an example of a treasure hunt, it is also a forerunner of the modern web based ARG as we know it, the clues in the book took the form of 15 paintings, with an extra 16th clue being released later in a national newspaper.

The clues were typical of the ARG clues that we are used to, for example each poster had a hidden word or series of words that, when combined, anagramed and unjumbled, consisted of a phrase that pointed to the location of the Hare. One of the paintings contained a clue on what order the words were placed in.

The obvious words on the border of each picture are other subtler clues and in some cases completely irrelevant. e.g. one poster has the word Herring, where all the letters are Red.
The extra clue published in the newspaper had a series of animals around the main figure in the picture, the first letters of which spelled out "Merry Christmas", so this was an example of interaction with the audience of the game.

There were even false clues, for example a magic square, where the numbers equated with Atomic Numbers from the Periodic Table and when the element letter abbreviations were substituted it translated to "FALSE NOUU THINK AGAIN".

One image (left) contains a picture of Sudbury Hall which may be a clue to the inspiration for the idea of the game as a version of Poisson's Shepherds of Arcadia painting was kept there at the time.

That painting is itself said to contain hidden clues that are supposed to provide hints to a hidden treasure, this treasure is explored in the books "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" and "The Da Vinci Code".
The prize was claimed in 1982, but it was later revealed that the person claiming it did not solve the puzzles, he had some inside help from the former girlfriend of the creator of the game. The first people that solved the puzzle as intended, only a short time after the prize was claimed, included someone with the surname Rousseau.

It's 30 years since the book was first published and hopefully you can see the link with Masquerade and what we are currently engaged in. There is no suggestion so far that we need to go and start digging up vast tracts of countryside in search of a golden polar bear, however it may well be that there are clues in the posters to a larger prize of some description.