To tell that story we’ll have to jump into the Way-Back machine and travel back in time to the mid 80’s. Uh, that’s 1980’s. Somewhere around 1983 or 84.

I had a tape recorder. For the young ones reading this that my not know what a tape recorder is, read the wikipedia article. It looked a little like this one.

My friends and I used to record ourselves all the time doing all kinds of things. Eventually it morphed into an imaginary radio station called Station F.A.R.M. (I grew up in very rural northern Alberta, Canada). We needed radio names so I created Cowpatty Bill. It just popped into my head. My friend Bryce was Gooseneck Frank and another friend Terry was Barnyard Joe. We made up news stories, traffic reports, even commercials, and we taped them all. I recall that we had a lot of fun with it.

Fast forward (get it? Sorry, tape humor) a few years to about 1997. The internet was becoming very popular. Eager to get in on the action I teamed up with a friend and created a website to do movie reviews. We called it Chili-n-Willie’s Movie Reviews for the Common Man. Thanks to the beauty of the internet never getting rid of anything the site is still up. I have long since closed my account with that ISP so I no longer have access to add, update, or at least remove the content. So there is sits in all it’s faded glory. You can see it….here.
(Watch the looping video clip on the front page. It’s funny)

We had a unique rating system. We used cow patties (poop) and the more patties a movie had, the more it stunk. So a movie with one patty was great whereas a movie with five patties was considered a terrible flick.

Branching off the imagined success of that I created a site where I challenged visitors with movie quote trivia. With the idea in mind that I would create several more successful sites I needed a main portal to encompass them all. That’s when I resurrected the name and created Cowpatty Bill Entertainment See it…here.
(I like how I make it sound like there are several people involved in the various sites when in reality it was all just me)
You can see that I even have a store that is still open.

So that is how it all started. Since then I’ve tried to keep my real name out of the internet by usng my alias. Is my real name out there? Yes, I can google myself and find a few links to me. Even some that tie me to the Cowpatty Bill name. I’m okay with it though. That name is more popular than my real one.

I’m married (12.5 years now) and have 3 incredibly awesome children. My oldest, Tyler is almost 10 and has Type 1 diabetes (this is why I support dyf.org), my daughter Emily is 8 and is becoming a talented piano player. My youngest is Ryan who is 2 and a half and is pre-diabetic. He is qute the handful.

Recently Ty and Em announced to me that they wanted their own Cowpatty identities. Tyler said he wanted to called Cowpatty Jr. Emily decided to be clever and came up wth Cowpatty Belle. It almost brought a tear to my eye. Kids are great.

By the way, my friend Bryce (Gooseneck Frank) went on to become an actual radio DJ. I like to think that I had a hand in that.

Thanks for reading.
Cowpatty Bill

Since then the websites that contained the hidden map pieces have updated their sites and the pieces are no longer there to find. Because of this many of the puzzles had to be reworked. So now, in the instances where the puzzle reveals a URL, you will type the URL as the answer (without the http://) instead of navigating to the website indicated (unless instructed otherwise).

If you wish to see the individual map pieces and solve the puzzle therein I will put them all together at the bottom of the list but they shouldn’t be done until all the other puzzles have been done.

Also keep in mind that within this game, you may need clues from previous puzzles in order to solve others.