About

About the riddle

Cipher is an online riddle. Its name, according to the dictionary, means "a message in code".
An online riddle is a kind of puzzle that requires the player to advance through a series of puzzles or "levels" in the form of HTML pages. Other kinds of games in this genre include NotPr0n (the first in the genre), Neutral Riddle, Clever Waste of Time, and many others.

If you want to get in touch, you can e-mail me at cipherriddle@gmail.com. Thank you.

About the creator

I, Benjamin Gabbay (Gamemastertips), was inspired to create this riddle after being the 13th person to fully beat David Munnich's NotPr0n, The hardest riddle available on the internet. I figured that after breaking my brain over NotPr0n's 140 levels, I'd compile the throng of level ideas I gathered during the year I spent on David's riddle and develop my own clever conundrum.

Aside from making riddles, I'm also a professional digital designer, writer, and a classical pianist and composer. All my web profiles can be viewed on my personal site, benjamingabbay.com.

About the riddle logo

The game logo is the odd symbol shown to the right. It consists of 5 Greek letters, bunched together to form a key-like symbol Sigma: Σ, Iota: Ι, Phi: Φ, Epsilon: Ε and Rho: Ρ. Placed side by side, these letters pronounce the English word "cipher", the name of the riddle.

Halls of Fame

Halls of Fame are added at significant milestones in the riddle's development. There are currently two: one for the first victors of level 50, and a special one for the first victors of each Temp End.

Question: Who is this 'Balthazar' everyone's referring to?
Answer: YOUWILLFINDOUTSOONENOUGHMORTAL

Credits

Many thanks to the following people who have lent their ideas, help, suggestions, and/or inspiration for the riddle:
David Munnich Inspiration for the entire riddle, and for first bringing mass popularity to the online riddle genre.
Emoon, formerly Kawkowa: One of Cipher's first moderators on the old phpBB forum, Emoon went on to lift Cipher out of the dark ages and develop and administrate the new Discord server between 2020 and 2021. Credits also for the ideas for Level 24, as well as for enormous feedback, help, and coding support throughout all of Cipher and beyond.
rnightshroud: For being Cipher's longest running moderator/administrator!—beginning on the old phpBB forum in 2010 and on the new Discord server since 2021.
Rasmus Antons, Catz, and weaver: For the development of the wizard app, which manages the level/channel access system on the Cipher Discord server...
...and credits again to Rasmus Antons, Catz, and Tyte for development of the image used in Status Terra, as well as for identifying bugs in levels 66-70, including a major (but fascinating) loophole in 70.
Wenyu "Hearson" Zhang: For discovering a major string of bugs in the old version of level 60, which has since been replaced. (He would like me to mention that he is an awesome hacker and programmer!)
Misa: Inspiration for level 58.
Blaise de Vigenère: Idea for Level 27.
8wmais: For immense help in developing the Greek riddle logo (above), and for some of the awesome puzzles in Level 38.
KillerT: For pointing out the existence of a major bug on level 44 (that has since been fixed).
Ralphjesy12: For pointing out quite a devious bug in level 59.
Yalcin Altay of EG24: For posting the riddle on his site, EscapeGames24, and generating some 6,000 unique views to this site in two days in the first weeks of the riddle's initiation.
Jon Anderson of EG24: For helping greatly in promoting the riddle across the web, including on Facebook.
Marven of Marv Riddle: For his delightfully devious and clever idea in the first part of Level 43.
Diego of Neutral Riddle: Inspiration for Level 15 (one of the most brilliant decoding techniques ever)

A Special Thanks to the Nordinho.net, GamersHood.com, and Cipher Forum Community:
Lebnny: For first advertising the riddle on Nordinho and giving it the jumpstarting surge of traffic it needed.
Adventure: For substantial level feedback, but most importantly, for alerting me that some of the riddle level URLs had been indexed on Google, allowing cheaters to jump straight to level 29 with a simple site search.
BBGK, Syk, MishuAnubis, Clee, Boke, PEL45, Tynka, SecretPirate, Dalveen, and many more: All for playing each level as it would come out and giving me much-appreciated feedback and bug reports along the way.
SecretPirate: For first advertising the riddle on GamersHood.com and thus further adding to the riddle's traffic.

Copyright information

All levels, photographs, and artwork used in the riddle, (except for a few vector images, free stock material, and memes) are Copyright © Benjamin Gabbay. Thank you for respecting this.