The first clue was a case of crossed wires — literally. In the Super Bowl ad and photographs on the contest website, MrBeast was wearing a belt stitched with multicolored Xs. To most football fans and many of the 268,000 people who would eventually register to solve the Million Dollar Puzzle, it was a fashion choice. To Colin Sanders, a software developer with an electrical engineering background, it was a cipher waiting to be unraveled.
The 30-second 2026 Super Bowl ad launched an elaborate, nonlinear treasure hunt built by game design company Lone Shark Games. A million dollars sat in a vault. Crack the interconnected puzzles first, with a little help from Slackbot, and it was yours.
“My sister-in-law was watching the game and she texted me the link and just said, ‘Go,’” recalled Sanders. “My family knows I like puzzles.” But it had already been an hour since the ad aired. It was late and maybe the puzzle would be solved by morning anyway. So Sanders slept on it. Morning came, and the puzzle hadn’t been solved, so he watched the ad, went to the site and noticed the belt immediately. The colored stitching represented the 25-pair color code: an electrician’s notation used in telecommunications hardware, in which two twisted wires of different colors combine to form one of 25 possible combinations.
