Cosplay Contest and Weekend Puzzle 372

Hello Nancy Drew Universe!

We are 15 days into our 31 days of Nancy Drew Cosplay Celebration! Don’t forget to enter the cosplay contest to participate in the fun!

Now I don’t want to tell you what to dress up as, but…… I’m crossing all my fingers for a Big Island Mike or a Carson Golf Ball cosplay! What makes Nancy Drew cosplay so much fun is you can do a classic game character who we see often like Frank or Joe, or you can bring to life a character we never see like Brigitte Penvellyn or Eustacia Andropov. Imagine what Fatima Buell looks like without her costume on!

For some inspiration check out these cosplay guides we have created over the years! In case you need more ~*inspiration*~ than that, I went deep in our archives and found my own entries from our 2015 cosplay contest! It is wild to think that just 6 months later I would be getting the call that I got the coveted Her Interactive Summer Internship!

    

Looking back at these photos I can’t help but laugh. I was living in my sorority house at the time during my sophomore year of college. I had just met half of the girls and I wasn’t sure what they would think of me if they found me dressing up as a kooky older woman from a computer game. I worked on Hotchkiss costume and photos Friday night when I thought most of the house was out for the night. Just as I was setting up my tripod to take the photos a few girls came back from dinner and had some very confused faces. I explained that I was entering a contest for a company  that makes Nancy Drew computer games and one girl yells “YoU mEaN hEr InTeRaCtIvE???” That is how I learned half of the girls in the house either played these games as kids or still played them in secret. Well, the secret was now out! Over the next month, girls from all different grades were helping me with my quest to win the cosplay contest. They were loaning me clothes, helping me make my phantom mask, taking my photos, I actually had to turn one girl down who tried to convince me I would “totally win if you just let me put colored contacts in and paint your face like a dog” (she was a big ghost dogs fan but having something touch my eye freaked me out, sorry M!).

You could say my quest to win the cosplay contest was a failure, but I say it was a massive success. Not only did my silly costume at 10pm on a Friday act as a perfect ice breaker for some great new friends, but it united 80ish 19 to 23-year-olds with the commonality of Nancy Drew. We shared games with each other and we had game nights where we set up the TV in our living room to play a game together. I can’t say if this took off so much because we truly loved the games, wanted to escape into a world outside of our stressful school work, or it just gave us that indescribable nostalgia feeling. Maybe it was a mix of all three.

 

I am VERY excited for Weekend Puzzle 372!

 

-Indy