19 years later, Notpron is still awesome
This post is not quite ordinary for my blog, as it’s not directly related to software engineering. But I suddenly decided to return to this online puzzle game Notpron decades later, and now it doesn’t go out of my one-track mind. So I just need to share it. Anyways, software engineers love puzzles, right?
If you tried Notpron and dropped it, go finish it. If you don’t know what it is, go try it. Seriously, it’s worth it. I dare you to make it past level 16.
Notpron is notoriously the hardest online riddle on the Internet. It has influenced dozens of other online riddles. I remember getting entangled in the London Tube map on level 76 and then just rage-quitting, only to return a decade later and solve it. Yes, working on a single level for years is quite ordinary here.
Every screen is just a plain web page with an eerie image and some obscure hints. Sometimes not even that. To solve the puzzle, you need to figure out how to get to the next level — simple as that. You move forward either by typing in something into your browser address bar or by entering a login and password to the next protected section of the website.
A couple of the final levels that required interaction with the game creator was removed some years ago, as apparently David Münnich got tired of his creation and moved on. Now the…
