{"id":294,"date":"2025-05-10T15:26:48","date_gmt":"2025-05-10T15:26:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aaronareed.net\/store\/?post_type=product&#038;p=294"},"modified":"2025-11-03T16:08:09","modified_gmt":"2025-11-03T16:08:09","slug":"if50-hint-book","status":"publish","type":"product","link":"https:\/\/aaronareed.net\/store\/product\/if50-hint-book\/","title":{"rendered":"IF50 Hint Book"},"content":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>These hint books were produced as a bonus reward for the &#8220;50 Years of Text Games&#8221; Kickstarter. They feature hints for all fifty of the games covered in the book, revealed by a red decoder wand that comes included.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Hint books were common in the days when most games had puzzles. Early game companies figured out this could be a valuable secondary revenue stream: they opened 900 number phone trees and sold hint books of varying designs to desperate fans. At one point, both Infocom&#8217;s and Adventure International&#8217;s hint books were outselling their games (probably due to rampant software piracy).<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>To keep from accidentally seeing hints you didn&#8217;t need, and also to prevent hint books from being easily photocopied, companies used various forms of obfuscation in their books, from invisible ink to numeric cyphers to cardboard decoder wheels. The &#8220;50 Years&#8221; hint book\u00a0honors this tradition by obscuring hint answers with a red pattern. Hold the decoder wand over an answer to reveal it (you may need strong direct lighting for the text to be legible).<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>The hint book contains at least one hint for each of the fifty titles covered in the book\u2014 yes, even for games which are no longer playable or don&#8217;t have any puzzles! Don&#8217;t expect comprehensive hints for each game\u2014 this is a sampler, not an omnibus!\u2014 but the hints aim to be helpful to new players just encountering each game for the first time.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":296,"template":"","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":""},"product_brand":[],"product_cat":[25],"product_tag":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-294","1":"product","2":"type-product","3":"status-publish","4":"has-post-thumbnail","6":"product_cat-if50","7":"product_shipping_class-small","9":"first","10":"instock","11":"shipping-taxable","12":"purchasable","13":"product-type-simple"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aaronareed.net\/store\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product\/294","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aaronareed.net\/store\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aaronareed.net\/store\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/product"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aaronareed.net\/store\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/296"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aaronareed.net\/store\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"product_brand","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aaronareed.net\/store\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product_brand?post=294"},{"taxonomy":"product_cat","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aaronareed.net\/store\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product_cat?post=294"},{"taxonomy":"product_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aaronareed.net\/store\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product_tag?post=294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}