AWS Quest- a puzzling situation

Starting on March 8th you might have seen AWS Quest popping up in different places. Now that we are a bit over halfway through the game, we thought it would be a great time give everyone a peek behind the curtain.

The whole idea started about a year ago during an casual conversation with Jeff when I first joined AWS. While we’re usually pretty good at staying focused in our meetings, he brought up that he had just finished a book he really enjoyed and asked me if I had read it. (A book that has since been made into a movie.) I don’t think there was a way for him to even imagine that as a huge fan of games, both table top and video games, how stoked I would be about the idea of bringing a game to our readers.

We got to talking about how great it would be to attempt a game that would involve the entire suite of AWS products and our various platforms. This idea might appear to be easy, but it has kept us busy with Lone Shark for about a year and we haven’t even scratched the surface of what we would like to do. Being able to finally share this first game with our customers has been an absolute delight.

From March 8-27th, each day we have been and will be releasing a new puzzle. The clues for the puzzles are hidden somewhere all over AWS, and once customers have found the clues they can figure out the puzzle which results in a word. That word is the name of a component to rebuild Ozz, Jeff’s robot buddy.

We wanted to try make sure that anyone could play and we tried to surround each puzzle with interesting Easter eggs. So far, it seems to be working and we are seeing some really cool collaborative effort between customers to solve the puzzles. From tech talks to women who code, posts both recent and well in the past, and to Twitter and podcasts, we wanted to hide the puzzles in places our customers might not have had a chance to really explore before. Given how much Jeff enjoyed doing a live Twitch stream so much I won’t be surprised when he tells me he wants to do a TV show next.

So far players have solved 8 of 13 puzzles!

The learnings we have already gathered as we are just a little past halfway in the quest are mind boggling. We have learned that there will be a guy who figures out how to build a chicken coop in 3D to solve a puzzle, or build a script to crawl a site looking for any reply to a blog post that might be a clue. There were puzzles we completely expected people to get stuck on that they have solved in a snap. They have really kept us on our toes, which isn’t a bad thing. It really doesn’t hurt that the players are incredibly adept at thinking outside the box, and we can’t wait to tell you how the puzzles were solved at the end.

We still have a little under a week of puzzles to go, before you can all join Jeff and special guests on a live Twitch stream to reassemble Ozz 2.0! And you don’t have to hold off for the next time we play, as there are still many puzzles to be solved and every player matters! Just keep an eye out for new puzzles to appear everyday until March 27th, join the Reddit, come to the AMA, or take a peek into the chat and get solving!

Time to wipe off your brow, and get back into solving the last of the puzzles! I am going to try to go explain to my mother and father what exactly I am doing with those two masters degrees and how much fun it really is…