The Wild, Citywide Scavenger Hunt That Ate San Francisco

On a Wednesday night in August, hundreds of people gathered in the lobby of Apple Cinemas in central San Francisco. To gain admission to the event, attendees had to say a secret code word to the crew working the door: three giggling children wearing oversize “SECURITY” caps.

The throng inside hunted for QR codes on the walls and admired a makeshift art gallery that showcased a collection of paintings, each referencing a famous historical work—Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring, Munch’s The Scream—but with the visage of a cartoon stick figure (his name is Percy) standing in for the central subject. A secret film played in theater 4. Dozens more attendees bought Percy T-shirts and added themselves to the waiting list for the booth dispensing Percy tattoos—a very real and very permanent commitment to the event they came here to celebrate.

This was the grand finale of Pursuit, a citywide scavenger hunt that took place for several weeks throughout San Francisco. The goal: Find Percy, whose likeness had been plastered across posters, begging—and sometimes threatening—people to call a phone number to find him. Anyone who did so was led to complete 12 elaborate quests hidden across the city. Each task was revealed at a different time and lasted a few days, participants uncovering clues to lead them one step closer to Percy.

A month into the search, with more than 12,000 players enlisted, the crowd of more than 800 people gathered at this theater, because Percy was finally going to make an appearance. Word had spread that he was maybe even going to speak.

Game Face

This is the second citywide Pursuit game; the first was held in the summer of 2024, and 300 people showed up for the finale. The scavenger hunt is funded in part by FranciscoSan.org, a grant initiative started by an anonymous benefactor that has allotted $100,000 to fund local efforts to “make the city and county of San Francisco more whimsical through eventures [sic] and installations.” The rest of the funding came from the organizers, a group of 20 or so friends.

Pursuit has no prize. There’s no glittering hidden treasure, no cash reward, no reveal that this had all been—as I had cynically feared—a marketing ploy to raise brand awareness for some new startup. The real prize, the organizers say, are the friends we’ve made along the way. Yeah, they know that’s cheesy. But they sure do mean it.

“Our friend group in general just really likes exploring,” says Athena Leong, a software engineer and one of Pursuit’s organizers.

Maybe you’re familiar with stories about San Francisco being a dying city—one that has seen its downtown eviscerated, its culture and soul hollowed out by gentrification and Silicon Valley solipsism. The Pursuit crew, largely a bunch of twentysomething tech workers, disagree.

During one of Pursuit’s clue days, Leong and I hopped into a car driven by fellow organizer Charlie Stigler. We drove across the city, from one mission clue to another. I tried to solve the puzzles on my own but was miserable at it. I was more focused on peppering them with questions about how—and why—they had put together this complex endeavor.

“We just enjoy doing things that are whimsical,” says Patrick Hultquist, a software engineer who had helped come up with the idea of a scavenger hunt last year. “It’s fun to do something that’s not profitable—not something that has to be economical to be justified, but just because it’s fun to see people play it.”

Pursuit missions took players across the city, hunting for clues hidden within public pay phones, inside fake crosswalk signs, and locked in boxes that could only be opened with codes. Pursuers solved riddles, climbed to the top of San Francisco's famous blustery peaks, and tapped NFC tags leading to a website that let them talk to trees. One mission ended in an actual car chase, players dashing through the streets to hunt down a white Chevy Trax with a big model of Percy strapped to the roof.

Players also wreaked some of their own havoc in turn—overloading the organizers’ messaging service, stealing clue props, and turning the game into a DIY dating app.

“Pursuit, for whatever reason, is a really popular date activity,” Leong says, scrolling through messages users had sent the support line about finding love while on the hunt.

City Solvers

Players ran the gamut of retirees, kids, families, and motivated puzzle nerds. Pursuit partnered with local businesses to stash secrets within their walls. One mission included a clue hidden inside a single dryer at Oomz Laundromat; when I visited, nearly 40 people were packed inside.

“Look at all these San Francisco introverts, actually talking and interacting with each other,” said Oscar Lopez, waving his hand at the chatty crowd. Lopez is a San Francisco native and returning player, pulled into Pursuit last year by the posters he saw around the city.

He scanned a QR code on the phone of Jaj Li, a player leaning on a crutch. Li was recovering from a stingray attack a week earlier, but here playing Pursuit all the same. Scanning the code of a fellow player added them to your Pursuit “troop.” A leaderboard tracked how many other players each person scanned. Lopez, who had added nearly 700 other people into his troop so far, was in second place; he had been harvesting more codes as people came into the laundromat.

Behind Lopez, Oomz’s manager used the opportunity to stroll through the crowd, asking people to scan a QR code of his own and leave his business a positive review online. The final clue for that day’s puzzle was found in a cassette tape at the volunteer-run Thrillhouse Records across the street, which was similarly packed. A few blocks away at the local ice cream shop Mitchell’s, where there’s always a line, Pursuit has its own flavor of ice cream. (Ask for the Percy, it’s ube and coconut.)

Pursuit organizers showed up at clue locations too, blending in with the crowd. Mostly they went to observe and occasionally help if they could discretely point someone in the right direction. Bansini Doshi, a local artist and student who played Pursuit last year and collaborated on building it this year, says the combination of role-playing and community building drew her into the operation.

“The things that were most striking was that you don’t know who’s doing it, who’s planning it, who’s funding it,” Doshi said. “That adds to the charm of it so much, because it really just feels like it’s for the love of the game.”

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.

People also stole stuff. A critical alligator statue went missing, and Leong had to replace an entire box of binoculars for a different mission. One mission involved an elaborate fake crosswalk signal box that Pursuit organizers attached to a pole. Somebody ripped it off and took it home. They later returned the box, wrapped in a black trash bag, with a note that read, “Curiosity got me. Box is intact! Sorry.”

Pursuit’s leaderboard feature got unexpectedly competitive.

“The entire point of the troop QR codes was we wanted to give people a reason to talk to each other and socialize,” Leong said. “But what we’re realizing now is that it’s gotten a bit transactional.” She says they will likely rethink that part of the game, or ditch it entirely, if they do the hunt next year.

Game Over

The Pursuit crew didn’t plan an ending for their hunt. Two weeks out from the finale, they scrambled, calling businesses who might be able to host what was rapidly turning into a very large gathering. Finally, Baskin connected, via Craigslist, with James Kilpatrick, a landlord of the Don Lee building at 1000 Van Ness Avenue where Apple Cinemas operates. (The theater chain is not affiliated with the local iPhone company.) Kilpatrick happened to be a fan of scavenger hunts and let the group use the lobby and a single theater. His three kids, ages 4, 6, and 8, were the ones running security.

Players who solved the final mission of Pursuit were led to a phone line and asked to answer specific questions about the puzzles, or just take half an hour to brute-force their way through multiple-choice questions like I did. The completed quiz led to a Partiful page listing the coordinates of the building.

Eudora Dong, a tattoo artist at Frozen Bun Tattoo and a friend of Doshi, set up the table to give people $50 flash tattoos of Percy and other Pursuit logos. Doshi, who helped run the table, said nobody expected anyone to actually take them up on the offer. But many attendees lined up.

“I get so much out of Pursuit emotionally,” said Anna Kalinsky as she waited to get an ankle tattoo of a duck, a reference to one of the game’s clues. “Part of that is a full willingness to commit. A tattoo felt like a logical conclusion of that. It's a little weird and a little crazy, but Pursuit really validates and encourages taking the dive.”

At last, a few minutes behind schedule, a saxophone player hired by the Pursuit team (again, via Craigslist) blasted the hook from George Michael’s “Careless Whisper” and sauntered up the staircase in the main lobby. As the song ended to applause, a figure that looked like a sports mascot appeared atop the staircase. It was Percy. The crowd cheered. The character’s voice, supplied by Walz, was piped in as Percy pantomimed a speech.

“You didn’t just play a game,” Percy said. “You remembered something this city has always known—that wonder lives everywhere if you have the courage to look for it. You proved that magic is not dead. It’s not buried under apps and algorithms and the crushing weight of everyday life. It’s right here, waiting … You are proof that curiosity is stronger than cynicism.”

After Percy’s speech, the Pursuit organizers, clad in hazmat suits, shared their thanks and mingled with the crowd. The event went on for a couple more hours, and by the time the theater closed and people trickled out of the building, Dong was still tattooing images of Percy onto people’s bodies. She was more than a dozen tattoos in, and she wasn’t even halfway through the wait list.