History Main / NeedleInAStackOfNeedles

* Similarly, in TheDarkKnight, some hostages are put in the same clown outfits that the Joker's underlings use.

* In ''BatmanBegins'' Ducard uses this tactic against Bruce Wayne, making himself look identical to all the other ninjas around him ... [[spoiler: but Bruce then uses it right back on him with a similar tactic.]]

* IsaacAsimov uses this trope in his short story ''Little Lost Robot'' in the ''I, Robot'' collection. A robot told to "go lose yourself" by an angry general does just that, by hiding in a shipment of 62 other robots of the same model as itself, and who differ from the lost robot only in that the lost one has a special programming modification and otherwise looks, sounds, and behaves identically to the robots in the shipment. Suffice it to say, Susan Calvin has quite the challenge on her hands in tracking him down.

** This was drawn from a similar short story in the original book ''I, Robot''.

** Perhaps in a nod to this, the [[TheElderScrollsFour sequel]] has a scene in ''The Shivering Isles'' in which you can drive an adventurer insane by showing him a cage filled with treasure, providing a key that doesn't work, and then dropping thousands of other keys into the room. [[VideoGameCrueltyPotential None of them work.]]

* There's a fairly small but highly intricate quest mod for ''{{Morrowind}}'' which at one point requires you to find a special key to continue. The only room it could possibly be in is filled with other keys. Every table and every nook and cranny of the room is covered in keys. As it turns out, the right one [[spoiler:is sticking out from the lock in the door]].

* An Episode of ''{{Futurama}}'' has Leela and Fry at the Central Bureaucracy in search of a pneumatic delivery tube that contain's [[spoiler: Bender's personality chip]], which was dumped amongst a mountainous pile of pneumatic delivery tubes.

* In MonkeyIsland2LeChucksRevenge, Guybrush has to find a map hidden within a pile of maps.

* The tribble bomb in the ''StarTrekDeepSpaceNine'' episode "The Trouble With Tribbles", hidden in grain storage with all the other hungry (& dead) tribbles.

** In "Time of Angels", the Doctor goes hunting for a Weeping Angel... in a building of statues. The episode, were it not for the adventurous feel of the fifth series, would be NightmareFuel - as anyone whose watched "Blink" can attest to.

-->'''The Doctor''':[[spoiler: And their image is their power. Power... Power! Ah, don't you see? All that radiation spilling out the drive! The crash of the Byzantium wasn't an accident, it was a rescue mission for the angels! We're in the middle of an '''army'''! ''[[OhShit And it's waking up.]]'']]

This kind of challenge is set up so as to allow characters to demonstrate their intellect instead of their physical prowess. Figuring out the clue to deduce which is the real {{MacGuffin}} may be a SecretTestOfCharacter.

A variation on HiddenInPlainSight. DoppelgangerSpin is this tactic applied to battle. For hiding ''people'', the equivalents are LostInACrowd and IAmSpartacus. ShellGame is when a stack of needles is made while a witness watches. PixelHunt is the video game equivalent.

* This very phrase is utterred by Lust in the dub of the FullMetalAlchemist anime. In particular, she mentions it when she and Gluttony are looking for Dr. Marcoh's notes on how to create a Philosopher's Stone. His notes are in the form of an unidentified book. And the book is written in code so you can't tell just by reading it that it's about the Philosopher's Stone. And it's in the largest library in the entire country. But since Lust and Gluttony desire to keep anybody else from reading the note, rather then read it themselves, [[spoiler: they settle the problem rather neatly by burning down the entire building, books and all.]]
* In {{Bleach}}, for Ichigo's [[TrainingFromHell training]] to learn bankai, he must find his zanpakuto amongst a field of hundreds of other zanpakuto, which shatter immediately if he tries to use them to defend himself against the manifestation of his zanpakuto spirit that is attacking him. However, they're all of wildly different shapes, and one of the first that Ichigo picks looks ''exactly'' like his real one... and it immediately breaks. It was a manifestation of him depending overmuch on Zangetsu, you see.

* In SpirouAndFantasio book "Yellow-Horned Rhinoceros", the duo is tasked to find a microfilm containing a prototype supercar schematics. The duo learns that the man who had it gave it to an African tribal chief, who bored a random rhino's horn, put the microfilm in there, and...released it back to the wild, ''amongst thousands of other rhinos out there''. The eponymous yellow-horned rhinos are results of the duo's attempt to identify which rhinos they had tranq'ed, examined, and marked off.

*** Of course, this is only after the villain chooses one, and intentionally picks out the most ornate, bejewelled, "King of Kings" cup. It's [[BodyHorror boobytrapped.]] So it was clear what "WRONG" is...
** Also from ''IndianaJones'', a government agency hides the [[ArtifactOfDoom Ark of the Covenant]] in a shipping crate, which is stored in an [[SecretGovernmentWarehouse immense room filled to the roof with identical shipping crates]]. Don't worry, it's protected by "top men".
*** ...Who?
**** Top. Men.
** There is an implication that there are many artifacts like the Ark in the warehouse, and that the Ark was not necessarily being "hidden" per se. Syfy's {{Warehouse 13}} seems to explore this a little more in-depth.

* In the DisneyFairies book "Vidia and the Fairy Crown," the queen's missing crown was accidentally placed in a room full of duplicate crowns (made as favors for the queen's [[strike:birthday]] arrival day party). The only difference between the real crown and the fake crowns was that the real crown would shrink or grow to fit the wearer's head. Cue four fairies trying on thousands of crowns long into the night...

* In AndreNorton's WitchWorld novel ''The Year of the Unicorn'', Gillian is magically split in two. Then her other half is surrounded by duplicates, and she has to pick out the right one.

* In CSI there was an episode where a murder victim was put inside a body-farm: a place where bodies are put in a number of different positions/environments so people can learn how they decay. [[spoiler: It's also subverted as they immediately notice that it's out of place and not on record.]]

* While most HiddenObjectGame approach it on the needle in a haystack approach, or blending it into the existing artwork, sometimes you have to find the correct object amongst a pile of similar objects.
* In NetHack, when running to the Astral Plane with the [[MacGuffin Amulet of Yendor]], be sure not to confuse it for one of many Cheap Plastic Imitations of the Amulet of Yendor.

* You can purposefully invoke this in [[TheElderScrolls The Shivering Isles]], where in one quest, ypu're tasked with stopping several treasure hunters. One room they're in has cage with vast riches in it. You can either fire a beam that will kill one of them, or drop in thousands of keys, and try to make them figure it out. Problem (or beauty) with this is none of the keys works, and one of the adventurers goes insane (Though this ''is'' the realm of madness).

* The ''ISpy'' book series has a similar premise to Where's Waldo, except you find objects instead of people.

** In ''Harry Potter and the Philosopher's/Sorcerer's Stone'' Harry has to find the right key from amongst a group of flying keys. [[spoiler: Ron deduces it should be similar to the handle on the door, and Harry spots it amongst the rest, noticing it has a broken wing, as if it's been shoved violently in the keyhole before.]]

A variation on HiddenInPlainSight. DoppelgangerSpin is this tactic applied to battle. For hiding ''people'', the equivalents are LostInACrowd and IAmSpartacus. ShellGame is when a stack of needles is made while a witness watches.

* Every HiddenObjectGame ever-- it's the whole point of the genre.