Beastly Complicated: How Colin Sanders Solved the Million Dollar Puzzle

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.

Drop Z and you have the alphabet. The wire pairs on the belt resolved into two words: Lima, Peru. One location down, dozens more to go.

Sanders, 32, lives in the Atlanta area with his wife and a 2-year-old son. He goes by DoctorXOR online and is part of a thriving online puzzle community. So he didn't go it alone. He joined a team that had gathered on Discord and migrated into Slack, where he used Slackbot as an organizational and creative collaborator to help with the hunt. The Salesforce newsroom interviewed him about why he loves puzzles and what it took to solve this one in particular.

What makes a great puzzle to you?

I love puzzles that are artistic - especially minimalist ones, with themes and symbolism that pull you in visually. I like finding something that's unique to the puzzle maker's mind and being able to marvel at what's going on in their head. This Jack Lance puzzle is tricky, but I couldn't stop looking at it. This mezzacotta puzzle hunt entry is technically about music but is really more art than music - you can look at the solution and see what I mean.

And what drives you nuts?

Fragile puzzles - ones where the connections are too easy to break. Like if you put a rubber duck and a locked box in the same drawer and the combo is just "DUCK." That's not clever; it's lazy. Too many red herrings are also frustrating. A great puzzle has internal logic that holds up.

You solved the first puzzle pretty quickly. Then what?

I put "Lima, Peru" in a spreadsheet. That one happened to be easy for me, but it was going to be difficult for most people, and that was itself a signal. It meant there was a real team behind this that knew what it was doing. They were willing to challenge people with something obscure enough that you'd struggle to even find the puzzle, let alone solve it. That was the hook.

Then what?

So Lima, Peru, is one of 91 locations you needed. There were 24 in the original ad - blink and you'd miss 'em. There were more scattered across all of social media; he had other content creators post videos, each with a hidden location. The billboard along the freeway had two - you had to zoom in to see numbers on the dial that worked out to Dimtu, a city in Ethiopia. And there was an underline on that same sign. Reading those letters backward gives you Nome, Alaska.

There were also 40 more locations on a separate site that came out in Phase 2. Once you connected all the cities by drawing "great circles" - a mathematical term for a circle that goes perfectly around a sphere - those lines formed letters and numbers on a map. That gave you the first nine characters of the vault code.

You eventually joined a team. How did that come together?

After about three days, I thought, "This is too big. It doesn't make sense to try to hammer away at this alone." There's a Discord community I've been part of for a long time. I checked in, and there were 60 or 70 people already in a channel for this. My condition was, if I can contribute right now, I'll stay. I spotted two puzzles in their progress sheet where they had an intermediate answer but hadn't pushed it to a location yet. I did that and thought, "All right, I'll stick around."

What was Slackbot doing for you?

I started making puzzle cards in Slackbot for everything, just to make sure I hadn't left things behind - which turned out to be the most important thing I did.

In terms of prompting it, the most common thing was asking it to help me compartmentalize, because there's too much to look at all at once. It was also really useful for figuring out which clue went with which puzzle. There was a computer lab scene in the ad with monitors, each one a separate puzzle that related to something in the bank video. Figuring out which screen connected to which element of the bank - that was what I'd go ask in Slack: "Here are the suspicious things in the bank that we think are clues. Which might work well with compass directions?"

Did it surface anything you'd missed?

The most important thing I'd had in there all along was a note about an early interview where MrBeast says to look for numbers in a random photo he took at the Super Bowl. I'd filed it away in a puzzle card. At the very end, when the team was stuck and people were really divided, I kept coming back to that note - and the hint system was responding to me saying, yes, you're on the right track. My theory is it had something to do with the fact that I had a complete compendium of puzzle cards - it seemed like it was responsive to my engagement level.

How else did it unstick you?

The thing I kept using it for was being abstract - just churning out different directions and seeing what stuck. I'd say, "What are other ways of thinking about these symbols?" and it would go on tangents, none of which had to be correct. The point was to get unstuck and think in new directions. It suggested latitude-longitude coordinates at one point when I was stuck on a set of numbers. That's a totally different, out-of-left-field direction. It doesn't have to be right - it just has to get me thinking somewhere new. I think that's genuinely something AI is good at that people aren't.

Would you have persisted without it?

I would have dropped it. No question. And part of that is that at the end I was kind of going rogue - I had this conviction about the photo clue and my team was really pushing back, like, stop wasting guesses on that. We had very limited guesses per day. I actually stopped putting my guesses in the shared log because people kept telling me I was wrong. When the hint system was confirming me - that gave me just enough to override that doubt from my team.

Also, I vented to Slackbot at one point, and it told me I should take a break. And I went, yeah, you know what, I should. So I took a whole week off - went back to real life, spent time with my kid. The team was stuck on the map anyway. I came back a lot better, and that's when we figured out the last part of the code from the photo clue that unlocked the vault.

What are you doing with the winnings?

We split it equal ways - it ended up being about 33 ways. We're also going to donate some of it to universities that have puzzle clubs. I'd be happy to get $100 for solving a puzzle, so this is crazy. The most immediate thing is that I have a big bonus room that I've been using as an office-guest room hybrid. I've been collecting corkboards and things for years and never quite put them up. So I really want to bring in contractors, install a wall, make it a real puzzle room - a mind cave, as it were. And I want to go solve more puzzles.

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