Some of the missions proved particularly vexing. One required climbing hundreds of steps up to Grandview Park and using binoculars to spot letters painted on the ground across the city. I got to the top of the steps, gasping for breath, and found around a dozen people already looking for their next clue. More than one had made the steep journey two days in a row.
“Pursuit players will do basically whatever we ask them to,” Leong said. Then, with a laugh, “I promise we are not a cult.”
San Franpsyche
San Francisco has a long history of monkeyshines: The Merry Pranksters, the Suicide Club, the Cacophony Society, Burning Man, the Jejune Institute, the drunken melee of Santacon.
This new era of Bay Area madcaps has the ultimate goal of ensuring that people have a good time. Like their predecessors, they have relentlessly committed to the bit.
Danielle Egan, one of Pursuit’s ringleaders, works in “Product BizOps” at LinkedIn but moonlights as an artist and all-around mischief maker. She, along with fellow Pursuit organizers Leong, Theo Bleir, and Riley Walz (himself an internet-famous prankster), have been behind elaborate stunts like Mehran’s Steakhouse, a fake New York fine dining restaurant that existed for one night only in 2024. In San Francisco, Egan hosted a Sit Club—a parody of run clubs that invited participants to gather and simply just plop down somewhere. For Pursuit, she says there’s an art to crafting puzzles that are just the right amount of frustrating.
“It can’t be too easy,” Egan says. “There is a middle ground. Some people should struggle.”
Other mission creators used the opportunity to build a sense of community online. Artist Danielle Baskin, who planned the laundromat and music shop mission, had players begin her mission by drawing a doodle of Percy and submitting their favorite song. Upon completing the quest, they were rewarded with a link to a 100-hour-long playlist made up of all the songs players had entered. The accompanying doodles for each song are available on a companion website.
Baskin flicked through the drawings coming in on the first day the puzzle had been released, toggling on and off a switch that read TTP. That acronym means “time-to-penis,” a term in gaming development that refers to how long it takes an online service to become inundated with dicks.
“There are actually only three penises so far,” Baskin says, surprised. “Our players are really very friendly.”
Puzzle Trouble
Pursuit ran into its share of technical issues. In the first days of the game, the Percy support line got so many sign-ups and messages that the group’s Twilio account was maxed out. For the first couple hours of one mission, the QR codes didn’t work and had to be swapped out.
