Completely exhausted right now, so I'll make this brief.
(pouring two fingers of Makers.. make that three)
After they completely changed the launch time from two of them at 7am and 9am to a single one at 11am. I had the locator site refreshing every five minutes or so. It constantly said no data available.
Finally one refresh and a location was up. The location was just a few miles from my house so I hopped in the car and jetted over there. I walked around an empty field (that's newly transplanted midwesterner for chunk of barren desert) until I realized this was the launch point not the landing zone. (You had no idea where they would launch it so I thought they could have launched it north west of town)
So I headed back home and grabbed the laptop and got it set up in the car, waited about 10 minutes until my grandson would be home from school and we headed out. At that point (1:20pm PST) it was showing over Needles.
We drove to Boulder City and caught the 93 southeast headed to Kingman AZ
We had a friend in South Carolina keeping an eye on the tracker just in case we lost decent enough cell service to use the data through the wifi hotspot on my phone.
We were about 30 miles from 68 highway which runs east to west from Kingman to Bullhead City.
About the time we got to Golden Valley where the two highways meet, the tracking map on their website turned from a usable google map to a lame image of the map with no ability to zoom in.
We narrowed down an area and began searching on foot.
At that point we ran into a couple other people so we figured we were in the right area.
Winds were from the Northwest so we began covering ground headed Southeast.
We split up and walked for hours in the desert. Up until the sun had just set over the mountains to the west and we had to resort to flashlights.
Around that time we ran into a kid who lived nearby, he mentioned he read on a forum about a group of people that were meeting with Bioware (software co. that designed the game for EA)employees.
So we got back in our car and headed to this gas station they were supposed to be meeting at.
At that time it was rumored that they had tracked down the unit themselves. So we just wanted see the thing. As soon as we pulled into the gas station the group of people scattered like cockroaches at the flip of a light switch.
So we just took off following one of the trucks that tore out of there. A chain of cars ran east on 68 back onto 93 north towards Vegas, only to turn off and stop at a roadside bar.
It was there that we found the Bioware employees and knowledge of what happened became known.
They picked it up, because something went wrong with the tracking system and the last known location was nowhere near the actual landing zone.
It was here that the 8 (6Xbox360 2PS3)copies of the game that had gone up were raffled off.
One copy was given directly to a guy who traveled from CO, (everyone there agreed he should get one) And one of the PS3 copies was directly given to a guy who had been held at gunpoint while wandering around the desert looking like the rest of us chumps.
The remaining PS3 copy was given away via a name grab from a bowl of paper. There were only 8 people that put there name in that drawing (myself including)
The rest of the Xbox copies were given out after assigning numbers to the 30 or so people waiting for that one. And one of the guys used a random number generator to pick the numbers.
My grandson got picked on the last one!
They then took the remaining names in the hat and drew for some tshirts.
I won one of them :)
The rest of the schwag is going to be raffled off later on, from a list of emails they took down.
So he ended up with a game that has been in space (well maybe as high as the stratosphere probably just the troposphere) and will get to play it for 10 days before anyone else.
And all I got was this lousy t-shirt
It cost me a half tank of gas (about $35) and about 250miles on the car.
And all afternoon and evening building one hell of a memory with my grandson.
I'd say it was a win win.
