Money Stuff: The Podcast · Friday, September 25, 2026
Ryan Patch and John Seale, creators of puzzle hunts like the Great Gotham Challenge, contrast their immersive approach with the more logic-leap-focused puzzles favored by early Midnight Madness organizers from the finance industry. They discuss how puzzle hunts have evolved from niche activities to sophisticated, location-based experiences.
“We're a little more breadcrumb that leap of logic in a way that like at the end of a good murder mystery, you look back and you're like, oh, the hints were always there that it was the butler. And so we're a little more on that end versus, yeah, they're more like, you have to make this leap of logic with no prior breadcrumbs.”
“I think every puzzle hunt has its own tradition of how it defines a puzzle. And Ryan and I are the first people to be in charge of the Midnight Madness tradition, kind of coming from the outside, not having played and not being from the finance industry. So we had to do our homework and spend a lot of time learning what's a puzzle by the definition of Midnight Madness.”
“So there's always some very specific activity. Now, we came kind of this from more of the immersion angle. We kind of asked ourselves the question, what would it look like if people felt like they were in a movie?”