On the 26th of October 2002 while participating in an elaborate treasure
hunt known only as The Game software engineer Bob Lord entered an abandoned
mineshaft in the desert near Las Vegas. He was convinced that he was on the
right track to retrieve the next clue in the 24-hour marathon hunt. He was wrong.
In the pitch blackness Bob slipped and fell to the bottom of an unseen shaft
sustaining injuries that would change his life forever. The roots of The Game
can be traced back to 1973. This was the year that two friends organized an
all-night puzzle solving treasure hunt across the city of Los Angeles with a
grand prize of $100. For a number of years this treasure hunt existed as a
clandestine underground game only open to those in the know. Eventually however
it drew the attention of the Los Angeles Times. After news of the hunt went public
Disney put together a movie called Midnight Madness based on this original
puzzle hunting game. This movie was what inspired Joe Belfiore - a student at
Stanford University - who organized several similar treasure hunts around
campus for his friends. These eventually evolved into a yearly event called the
Bay Area Race Fantastique or BARF for short. BARF eventually transformed into
The Game, spawning several offshoots and other chapters as it did so. These other
chapters included the Bay Area Treasure Hunt
aka BATH, the Bay Area Night Game aka BANG, and the Iron Puzzler. From
humble beginnings Joe Belfiore had created a puzzle hunt movement. And the hunts
themselves were only getting more and more ambitious. In most cases the team
who won one year's hunt would be responsible for organizing the next
year's game. This led to a great deal of one-upmanship
with game controllers setting more and more extreme challenges each year. To
give you an idea of the nature of The Game at this point in time one challenge
involved participants being kidnapped, stripped of all possessions and clothes,
and clad only in a hospital gown. They would then have a clue written on the
back of their neck before being deposited at a strip club. The challenge
was to find a mirror and get a look at the clue without attracting undue
attention or being ejected from the club. The 2002 edition of the game, which
was given the title Shelby Logan's Run, involved some particularly wacky
challenges. The day began with teams camped out on a dry lakebed in El Dorado.
Having weathered a spectacular storm during the night nine teams were awoken
by a pair of helicopters buzzing low overhead to drop the first clues. Thus
began an incredible road trip. As well as driving hundreds of miles between each
clue, teams had to climb ancient rock formations, perform a striptease a drag
bar, don scuba gear and solve an underwater puzzle, catch a live mouse and
extract a clue from its stomach without hurting it, and fire off 50 rounds from a
fully automatic machine gun without going off target. It's safe to say that
the teams had enjoyed a fairly wild day of adventure and excitement by the time
they arrived at the Argentina Mine near Goodsprings, Nevada. This site had once been
an active mine where zinc, silver, copper, and gold were pulled from the earth. By
2002 the site had long since been abandoned. Numerous openings led down
into the ground. It was around 8:20am when the first
teams pulled up at the site of the mine. Game Control were already in situ
ready to welcome them and equip them with hard hats and flashlights. The clue
that led teams to the Argentina Mine had said that they were to enter mineshaft
1306 only. That's where they would find their
next clue waiting for them at the end of a hundred yard long walk in the dark.
This was where things went wrong. Drastically so. One team arrived at the
site of the mine from an unexpected direction, missing Game Control
completely. Leading this team was 37 year old Bob Lord, a Microsoft employee and a
family man who had recently launched his own search engine. Bob was exhausted and
disoriented after a crazy 28 hours on the road. That may be one factor which
contributed to what happened next. Bob's team wandered the site, following a set
of GPS coordinates until they arrived at mineshaft 1296. It seemed to
Bob and his team that they were being pointed directly into the dark maw of
the mine. This was further confirmed by a spray-painted warning above the entrance.
"No, no, no, no, no!" it read in luminous spray-paint. The word "No" had been a
crucial part of a previous clue. Bob led the way into the dark, the shaft
illuminated only by the glowing screen of his GPS. They inched forward step by
step until suddenly, with barely a sound, Bob and the glow from his GPS screen
disappeared completely into the blackness. His team didn't know it
immediately but Bob had fallen straight down a 30-foot mineshaft, breaking his
back in the process. The Game came to an abrupt halt. Only two teams finished and
the rest were called off by Game Control. A tricky rescue was effected in the
cramped confines of the mineshaft and Bob was transported to a nearby hospital.
The outlook was bleak. His limbs were mangled, his brain potentially damaged,
and he would be unlikely to ever walk again. Bob's wife Jacques Lord flew
out to be by his side in hospital. She and Bob were visited by Game Control, who
brought balloons and a get-well card. Shocked
as she was by the tragic turn of events Jacques sympathized with them. Bob's injury
had destroyed not just his life but their long-running creation too. This
sympathy evaporated, however, when Jacques discovered that Game Control had been
warned against using the mine as a location by a safety expert. Indeed
they'd been told that it would be crazy to induce teams to go anywhere near the
Argentina Mine... and yet had done so anyway. A suit was filed in Las Vegas
resulting ultimately in a $10.6 million settlement being paid to
the Lord's by five members of Game Control. The sixth member refused to
settle, and so was taken to trial. After two weeks he was judged to have no
responsibility for the injuries caused. With that the legal process surrounding
Bob Lord's injuries came to an end. For Bob Lord, however, things would never be
the same again. He was confined to a wheelchair, able only to move one finger
on one hand. His sight failed within weeks leaving him mostly blind and
dependent on his family for care. This dependence took a heavy toll - something
that Jacque Lord measured in a series of blog posts she wrote at the time. On
one occasion she wrote the following. "The man I married died in the bottom of that
mine. In his brain he has the chip that holds the memories of us, of our life, of
our children... but he is not the same man."
Although a version of the game still runs in Seattle to this day it is not
the same heady, crazy treasure hunt it once was. It has been scaled back, made
safe; ambition reigned in in favor of safety. For Bob Lord however these
changes came too late. For this one unlucky player The Game ended with a
single misstep in the dark, underground, in October 2002.