Dance Club Solution

How it works

When teams first enter the club, they discover a loop of seven songs playing, as well as a staffed DJ booth. In front of the DJ booth are request slips and signs stating that requests are cheerfully accepted.

Most requests made by teams are sarcastically rejected at first; clearly, there must be something else at play. As it turns out, if you listen carefully to the lyrics of the songs (which are helpfully projected on the screens along with a color-cycling rainbow visualization), it becomes apparent that each song contains a "DJ Request" - a lyric asking the DJ to do something, like 'Jam Tonight', 'Let It Play', or 'Blow My Speakers Up'.

When one of these correct requests is submitted to the DJ, the request is queued up and played on a round-robin basis. The requests are clearly different than the base songs - they consist of 2-3 song clips, and the visualization changes to a solid color while the request is playing.

Once a team has submitted a correct request, the DJ gives them a code to unlock DJ Plus, an innovative tool for budding young DJs designed for netbook use. This application contains a list of all seven songs playing on loop, as well as a password box to enter a single password for each song.

The key to obtaining the passwords is to listen to the request tracks; each of the request clips contains a DJ command as well, and the password is the unique word that is common to each of the tracks in a request. (For example, "Play another", "Please play it for me", and "Let it play" yields the common password "play").

Once a correct password is entered, pressing Play yields a snippet of the song with a single word. Now all that remains is to order the tracks correctly and press Play All. You can order via either alphabetizing the common word or by using the rainbow order of each color - both will yield the same ordering.

Solution

When you press Play All with the correct passwords and the correct order, you will hear "Send my love to the dance floor". This is a Cobra Starship song that happens to contain a DJ command, "You gotta put a record on, yeah." Submitting this to the DJ as a request will yield an envelope containing an empty airline bottle of Jack Daniels, containing the answer to the puzzle, BOTTLEOFJACK.

Design notes

The original version of this puzzle involved a DJ Hero controller and manually locating sections of the song. It was a spectacular failure, due in large part to the answer phrase that involved using a guttural "Unh" from a Missy Elliott song to form part of the word "Tell-Unh!-Vision". Derek and Kim's help in reworking the puzzle to its current, viable state was greatly appreciated.

The visualization was developed from scratch in XNA by Game Control. It looks pretty sweet - in fact, some of us are of the modest opinion that it looks better than many of the stock Windows Media Player visualizations.

The lyric synchronization for the karaoke was done painstakingly by hand, involving a special app with a single button that you could click in time to the song's lyrics to capture the timestamp data.

GC notes

The requests from teams for actual songs were amusing to receive (and varied in their awfulness). GC was particularly amused by the team that requested Billionaire, as this song happened to be reaching the top of the Billboard charts right around the time that GC was on vacation in Hawaii, and GC is in universal agreement that the song is so frickin' bad.

Feedback from teams indicates that the music selections were universally loved and adored by all participants. Wait, the other thing.

Emptying the bottles of Jack Daniels for the solutions was a particularly difficult task, but Game Control endured it for the good of the event.