The mysterious origin of the board game about hacking codes Mastermind

She became a world sensation. It was used in Fallout. She helped create the cybersecurity industry. But where did she come from?

“This is not interesting,” Dan Theitel thought.

In Fallout 3, there are plenty of computer terminals, and if a player wanted to break into one of them, he had to win the mini-game, abstractly representing the hacking process. Teitel, who worked as a Fallout programmer at Bethesda in 2007 , was responsible for the design of this mini-game, and he thought that the players would hate it. “It used the letters that appear on the screen and a countdown timer - another mini-game that gamers would call boring and annoying. I was not a game designer, but I considered it my duty to somehow improve this idea. "

A few days later, still unable to come up with anything better, Teitel received an email from his friend Bob. “It seemed to me an amazing gift from the gods ... I opened a letter with the message“ Hello, remember this? ”And a link to the online version of the game Mastermind.”

Teitel was in seventh heaven. Mastermind will be an interesting game.

This year, the Mastermind board game dedicated to hacking codes is 50 years old. But actually she is older, and no one knows how much. It is ironic that this is a game about breaking codes, the sources of origin could not be found.

If you know Mastermind only as a shabby and rarely opened box that settled on the mezzanine or in the entertainment room of nursing homes, then you have no idea how popular it was at the time of its appearance. Invented in 1970, Mastermind was sold in 30 million copies in less than ten years. It hosted the national championship in the Playboy Club, her fan was Muhammad Ali, the Australian military officially used it for training, and in Denmark it was bought by 80% of families. “I never thought it was possible to come up with a game again,” the Missouri toy store manager wondered in 1977. “Real classics like Monopoly.”

These were good times.

BoardGameGeek Kaffedrake User Photo

If you are not familiar with Mastermind at all, for example, if you have never lived in Denmark, then I will tell you a little about it. The game takes place on the field. The encoder comes up with a sequence of four multi-colored pins, and the code cracker must recreate their exact pattern in a certain number of attempts. After each attempt, the encoder can only report that the cracker has placed the pin in the right place, or that the pin is in the sequence, but is not in the right place. According to the authors of the game, a decision in five attempts is considered "better than average", and in two or less attempts - a pure success. In 1978, British teenager John Sargent won the Mastermind World Championship by solving the code in just three attempts and 19 seconds. (The second place was taken by eighteen-year-old Canadian Cindy Fort; she tellswhat kind of victory were given prizes and boxes of Mastermind.)

Mordechai Meirovitz, an Israeli telephone setup engineer, developed Mastermind in 1970 based on the already existing Bulls and Cows game of unknown origin, in which numbers were used instead of multi-colored pins. By the way, no one knows where the Bulls and Cows came from. In a conversation with me, computer experts who adapted the first known versions of the game in the 1960s recall the game in different ways: someone says that she is one hundred years old, others - that a thousand. But no matter how old it was, no one received as much from the Bulls and Cows as Meirovitz, who soon left the development of games and lived well on license fees after selling the prototype Mastermind to Invicta, a British manufacturer of plastic products, which expanded the range goods games and toys.

Mastermind entered the young fast-growing market of "adult games", where the new favorites, Scrabble and Monopoly, fought for places on sales lists and on coffee tables with chess and go. “People preferred to sit at home and play backgammon, instead of spending $ 30 for dinner,” explains adult game sales manager Jock Miller. According to the psychologist, chess researcher and author of the “Official Mastermind Guide” Leslie Olta, an adult game has become a complement to a lifestyle (“a game can serve as a party element like a meal with a bowl, a bowl of nuts or a table with alcohol”), appealing to primitive human passions. “I call it the“ need for hunting, ”” he writes. In the modern world, "people pursue their prey in the form of games."

BoardGameGeek Shandazar photo of the Royale Master Mind version of the game

In a conversation with Tampa Times, Alt confirmed that a sexual element is also involved in the game. “A man and a woman caught up in the confrontation of an intense game can create an emotionally charged situation,” sums up the Times . “Marketing tactics, for example, the covers of games in which a man and a woman bend over a table with a meaningful look, exploit the topic of sexual arousal.”

Mastermind successfully hit a number of adult games. Invicta has flooded the market with luxury, miniature, children’s, “big”, “royal” and electronic versions of the game, as well as a braille version (“It is logical to expect that people playing Electronic Mastermind will be confused with diligent workers who work hard with their calculators” , Louisville Courier-Journal predicted ). There was even a “version of pure gold”, “with a field encrusted with diamonds and pins hand-carved from stones - agate, ivory, amber, coral and lapis lazuli”. In 1978, this option cost 29 thousand dollars (120 thousand including inflation).

According to Olta, the secret to Mastermind's success is very simple. It is easy to learn how to play it, the parties are fast, the game does not require translation and rewardsmathematical analysis and strategy. For example, “if the cracker thinks out loud or puts test pins on the board, then there is no need to react. If necessary, read the magazine or occupy your mind in some other way. ”

The classic Mastermind cover with Cecilia Fun and Bill Woodward (scan by BoardGameGeek Kaffedrake user

In addition, Olt writes, there is a deeper attractive power in games. “In the modern world, the average person is constantly reminded of his powerlessness - the threat of global catastrophe caused by bombs, pollution, biological weapons and the like; about the impact of even such distant events as, for example, the Arab oil policy; about the many violations of the “big” governments of the right to life and freedoms; and about the aggravation of problems such as crime and social tension, which seem "There are no clear or effective solutions. Unlike most games, Mastermind has the answer - the only correct hidden code."

In addition, it seems to me that the aesthetics in which Meirowitz and Invicta wrapped the Bulls and Cows seems important. In particular, I'm talking about the cover. The original Mastermind box is adorned with a portrait of a fashionably dressed and unemotional woman bending over an elderly man sitting in a chair dressed in a suit, clutching the fingers of both hands. Or, according to commentators of that era:

• “A graceful woman and a mysterious dude” (Les Gelber, president of the American branch president
• “An alienated bearded red-haired man and a Eurasian beauty. The art editor asked me who they were ... He said it would be important for the story. ”(Patricia Rice, St. Louis Post-Dispatch)
• «, , … , , ? , ; , , , . Mastermind , , ». ( )

These powerful forces were Cecilia Fun and Bill Woodward; she was a student of computational science at the University of Leicester, he is the owner of a network of hairdressers in Leicester, also known to the townspeople under the name "Mr. Sneak and Badass." Woodward later changed his nickname to “Mr. Mastermind” and even claimed to have recorded the title in his passport . (Fung went around him, taking her husband’s surname after the wedding and becoming Cecilia Masters.)

On the cover of Mastermind we don’t see “Mr. Sneak” and “poor student”(as Cecilia herself called herself), we don’t see the woman sitting behind Fun, who is holding an oversized dress. We do not see traces of urine on Woodward's pants, which appeared after an unsuccessful attempt to photograph a cat on his knee. We see these anonymous well-dressed figures who, according to Masters, were asked to pretend to be a "sedate and mysterious" look - a hint of a "world power elite." You see the riddle and the question inextricably linked with the name of the game: Mastermind (“outstanding mind”) - who is it? he? it? or you? The aesthetics of Mastermind were appropriate for that era of James Bond, John Le Carré and Congressional investigations into the secret activities of intelligence agencies. This is an example of the power of the image, or the design of the narrative: thanks to the title and cover photo, Invicita turned “Bulls and Cows” into a game of espionage and intrigue, and “Mr. Dodger and Bully” into an outstanding mind.

Bill Woodward continued to pose for the covers of subsequent editions of Mastermind , but Cecilia Masters no longer participated, and not on her own initiative. After taking the picture, Masters no longer heard from Invicta, but met with one of the agents who selected her. He promised to contact her, but again no news came. “I began to notice that my roommate ran to the mailbox every morning before me. Later I found out that she was destroying letters from the studio, ”says Masters.

Cecilia’s neighbor, who was also a student in computer science, was on trial with her, and Masters thinks the neighbor was upset that she didn’t choose her. “She said she was curious to know about the results of the shooting, and when she opened and then destroyed my first letter, she had no choice but to destroy all further correspondence.”

“I was very upset by this incident”

The back cover of “Mastermind Edition“ Game of the Year ”” (scan by BoardGameGeek Kaffedrake by user Mastermind

itself is just a new costume for an old and, to be honest, much more mysterious game. Most people don’t even know its real name. It can be found under the name “ Bulls and cows ", but most people who played it in childhood do not remember what they called it. There is no information about why it is called and how old it is. A tyrannosaurus could well invent it. And I believe that for a complete understanding of Mastermind, it is necessary to understand “Bulls and Cows”, because they are essentially the same, so I’ll immerse myself as deep as possible in history to solve this riddle.

The very first reference to “Bulls and Cows” is found in the work of Dr. Frank King. In 1968, King studied at the PhD in Electrical Engineering at Cambridge University and was looking for a program that could be implemented on a Titan university computer, recently equipped with Multics, a time-sharing operating system that allowed multiple users to access a computer simultaneously and remotely.

Choosing a fun and slightly more complicated game than tic-tac-toe, King wrote a version of the puzzle that he played as a child. “Well, well, you wrote Bulls and Cows,” he recalls the words of a student, although the game was called MOO.

Entrance to the Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory (the concept of “computer laboratory” did not yet exist).

In addition, King implemented in it a new then for computer games feature: a rating table, or a leaderboard, in which players could record their points. “In the first few days, people competed with each other, trying to climb higher in the ranking table,” he says. “It was noticeable that people are playing better and better, but as a result, someone with an impossibly large average was at the top.”

This was a new type of security vulnerability, against which the operating systems of that time did not have natural protection. If a player in MOO had the opportunity to update one of King's files, in particular, entering his name and score in the leaderboard, then he could theoretically easily enter a false score, delete another player’s score and even change the source code itself.

King's game hackers admitted everything, but every time he tried to eliminate the vulnerability, he was hacked again. “It was a very friendly war,” he says. “No one tried to say“ I am better than you ”, did not seek to be the first. We all worked together to improve the system. "

Titan 1 during commissioning, the picture was taken from the survey gallery above the laboratory.

However, King, distracted by his PhD, did not keep up with the tricks of the hackers, which led to the intervention of the then informal Cambridge computer security group, who said that King’s problems with MOO "will become very important in the future." If you allow the user to modify the MOO rating table, this opens the door to making unwanted changes; the same can happen if the bank allows the client to carry out an electronic withdrawal of funds. And in fact, and in another case, according to King, these are just users who make changes to someone else’s file.

The Cambridge Computer Security Group managed to protect MOO, but only by hiring hackers. (One of the hackers refused to explain how he hacked MOO until he was threatened with a computer ban; he ended up working in Cambridge for 50 years.)

“Companies like IBM realized too late that this would happen with their own PCs. IBM mainframes of the late 1970s did not have the proper protection, ”King recalls. Cambridge bought an IBM computer and, using the patches created for MOO, increased the security of the operating system; Thus, today the Bulls and Cows DNA can be found not only in video games like Fallout (and Neverwinter Nights , and Sleeping Dogs), but also in the basic functions of computer security.

Leslie Olt demonstrates Mastermind on a large playing field.

Then came the bad times.

Leslie Olt recalls how Mastermind's popularity has plummeted. After the child prodigy John Sargent won the first two international championships, Olta was asked to find a chess player who could defeat him in the third 1979 championship in Rome. But then, without any notice, the whole event was canceled. “I got the impression that the hype started to subside and the market was oversaturated,” says Alt. Just as quickly, the author of the “Official Mastermind Guide” closed this chapter of his life. “My first wife stayed in California, I became a single father in Jersey ... and my father was dying of prostate cancer. “Mastermind was interesting as long as it stayed afloat, but then other topics took up my attention, and I moved on.”

Even Denmark, in which almost everyone had Mastermind, seemed tired of the game. I talked with many Danes who admitted that after a dozen years of hype, Mastermind simply went out of fashion in the early 80s. (However, one woman recalled “some scandal that killed the popularity of the game ... something like the game is mesmerizing.”)

Unlike the Mastermind party, there is no answer to the question about the reasons for the decline. The glut and endless variations of the game could not help her (in particular, manufacturers were warned that Mastermind should not be made of pure gold), and this excess was probably exacerbated by the inability to repeat the success of Mastermind with another game. Projects such as Omar Sharif Teaches You Bridge and Ouija (“Invicta claims that this game allows you to develop the hidden spiritualistic powers that everyone has”) could not rectify the situation. Invicta itself gradually phased out its activities and in 2013 its assets were sold; Now its intellectual property is controlled by the toy giant Hasbro.

Today, Mastermind continues to produce a division of Goliath Games, but on the boxes there is not a single modern version of Bill Woodward or Cecilia Masters. Both were replaced by a photograph of the playing field itself. Writer Richard Mackenna describes the modern Mastermind as “a box painted in abstract vibrant colors that shout that it is a toy; all traces of previous incarnations that used the ideas of success and power, which were greatly modified after the appearance of the game, now completely disappeared. ”

Cover of “Mastermind Remastered” by Pressman.

Woodward and Masters' cryptic glances from outside the picture allow us to understand how they contributed to the game’s personality. In its 50 years, Mastermind no longer strives to be a chic accessory or an invitation to the battle of powerful world elites. Today it is a toy indistinguishable from its copies . It's just Bulls and Cows.

Such a drastic change for the game, which is just over 50 years old, is a rather rude act. I thought about this while talking with Leslie Olt in between his visits to his wife in a nursing home for people with dementia; he recalled Mastermind tournaments at the Playboy Club. Bill Woodward passed away in 2013; his family informed me that Woodward was an “exquisite gentleman” and that his adult daughter had died in a terrible incident. Cecilia Masters has built a successful banking software development career; today she partially retired, traveled around the world and runs several summer cottages in East Sussex. According to her, Mastermind did not have much influence on her life, but she wonders if "my life would have been brighter if my friend hadn’t destroyed the letters from Invicta."

Mordechai Meirovitz almost immediately after the creation of Mastermind began to participate in the educational program for gifted children, "The Odyssey of the Mind." I asked this organization if they could tell me about Meirovitsa, but no one remembered anything.

Mastermind still exists, but the 50th anniversary was not an occasion to honor the game, but emphasized its withering and reminded that everything and everyone is mortal.

Students and staff at work at the Cambridge Mathematics Laboratory.

Frank King does not remember exactly where he learned to play “Bulls and Cows” - a game that came out of his subconscious and got into the ancient Cambridge computer Titan.

He only said that he always knew about her. “I played it as a kid in the 1950s. Probably in elementary school. ” He wonders if it is a coincidence that the friend who taught him how to play Bulls and Cows was a child of the owner of a dairy farm.

Is it possible that Mastermind has evolved from some traditional farming game? Sibon Gleeson, who grew up on a farm in the Irish county of Cork, does not think so. However, she proposed a theory explaining why the name “Bulls and Cows” was suitable for playing with numbers and classifications. “Perhaps this has something to do with cattle tags?” For example, with those that attach cows to their ears? I keep one of these tags in my jacket pocket as a reminder of my deceased father, and therefore I often recall it. Perhaps when this game appeared, only the bulls had tags with numbers? ” Gleason told her sister Mary about this riddle. Mary recognized the puzzle, but did not know that she had a name, and did not exactly remember where she had learned to play it.

Mastermind always has an answer. "The one and only correct hidden code." Leslie Olt wrote that he is a gift in our mysterious and chaotic world in which an ordinary person is constantly reminded of his own powerlessness. But as regards the question of the origin of Mastermind, I am inclined, in the absence of other evidence, to the fact that "this is somehow connected with what the farmers know."

But I believe that in this riddle, contrary to the spirit of the game, there is something pleasant. I like to think of Mastermind not as intellectual property with a clearly defined owner, but as one of the facets of an apparently ancient puzzle of mysterious origin, spread in history and culture like a meme, without owners and owners.

Anyway, I want to think about Mastermind not as a brand, but as an ageless idea. Otherwise, it will turn out to be a subject that may turn 50 years old and which may die.