Wired celebrated its 20th anniversary
year in 2012 with a hidden and quite old-school little print puzzle.
If you stack the January through December issues with the covers facing up, it
reveals a (frankly hard-to-read) quote on the spines that Wired founding editor Louis Rossetto made
in the first issue, in 1993: "Our first instruction to our writers: Amaze
us." A reader in Riverside, Calif., named Ben Allen was the first to
notice the pattern—realizing after the first nine issues that it was spelling
out a message. He quickly guessed the complete line with a Google search. The
puzzle's makers, Eric Harshbarger and Mike Selinker, were wise to stick with
Rossetto's pithy first instruction to writers. His second was: "We know a
lot about digital technology, and we are bored with it. Tell us something we've
never heard before, in a way we've never seen before. If it challenges our
assumptions, so much the better."
