MacHeist is really well-known in the Mac techie world but not so much when you step just outside of that world. Essentially MacHeist is two things: A form of an alternate reality game (ARG) and a promotion for indie Mac software.
The ARG part involves a series of challenges or “Heists” as they call it that users participate in either alone or as a community – you can complete the challenges yourself but some parts can be insanely difficult, technical, or require obscure knowledge so the community works together by discussing in the forums. Each Heist unlocks some free software (that are normally not free) for the participants and new challenges are revealed. In the end, a steeply discounted software bundle is revealed and a lot of the participants buy it.
Just yesterday MacHeist unveiled a mini-heist as a warm-up to the upcoming MacHeist III. I was poking around thinking of participating but the first puzzle got Mariano’s attention and we were both immediately hooked. We ended up spending four hours solving the 9 puzzles and it was a blast. About 3 of them required fairly technical knowledge and a few required a Mac (to run applications) but all in all it was fairly accessible to non-techies. Of course, you can just cheat and check the forums for answers if you get stuck. We needed a little help on a couple of them but managed most of it.
During the past two MacHeists I sat on the sidelines and only last year did I create an account to sang some freebies without actually working on the challenges. But this year, I’ll be waiting anxiously and jumping in as soon as it begins.
