Hotline Miami

First things first, we opened iamthekidyouknowwhatimean.wav in Audacity. Since we suspected stego (and not a sick lo-fi mix), we switched the track view to Spectrogram mode.

Tip: Use Ctrl + 1 to zoom in and Ctrl + F to fit the view.

And what did we found?

“WATCHING 1989” written clearly in the spectrogram.

From the readme.txt, we saw the structure: Subject_Be_Verb_Year

Now we already have:

· Verb = WATCHING

· Year = 1989

That leaves us with Subject and Be. We assumed Be = IS because:

· It fits grammatically.

· It’s the simplest and most common verb-to-be in basic sentence construction.

· It gives us a sentence that makes sense.

So far, we had: _IS_WATCHING_1989 Let’s find our Subject.

We ran strings rooster.jpg just to poke around, we found:

RICHARD looks very out of place and very intentional. Now everything connects:

· RICHARD is the name of the rooster mask character in Hotline Miami.

· He is literally the "Subject" of most in-game chaos and cryptic calls.

So now we had: RICHARD_IS_WATCHING_1989

Which perfectly fits the structure!

Flag: umcs{ RICHARD_IS_WATCHING_1989}