Who Wants to Win a Trip into Space?
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Microsoft and AMD have created a collaborative puzzle game, the Vanishing Point sweepstakes, to celebrate the consumer release of Windows Vista at the end of this month. First prize? A ride into suborbital space. |
Given all of the news coming out of International CES in Las Vegas this week, I nearly missed the official announcement confirming the mysterious Vanishing Point game and detailing all the prizes.
You have to hand it to Microsoft to never miss the opportunity to get a lot of product buzz going through an interesting or unusual marketing-type campaign.
But winning is not going to be easy and the competition will be fierce. Vanishing Point challenges players to solve an international game, drawing clues from events at various locations across the world to decipher online puzzles.
Each week, 12 puzzles will be posted on the Web site along with footage of an unusual real-world event. Each puzzle consists of an online element and a real-world element, which have to be combined to arrive at the correct answer.
Players can take part in a puzzle by either showing up at the physical location at a specific time, or by going online to view the recorded footage of the event.
The action all hinges on Loki, the mysterious Microsoft Puzzle Master, and the first real-world event took place earlier this week by the fountains outside the Bellagio Hotel and Casino.
There are nearly $500,000 in prizes, and the eventual winner will get a ride into suborbital space, courtesy of Rocketplane Limited, which is expected to first take flight in 2008 with a ticket price of some $250,000 a person.
The Rocketplane XP Vehicle is a four-seat fighter-sized vehicle fitted with a delta wing and a V-tail. The vehicle is powered by both turbojet engines and a rocket engine, enabling it to accelerate to speeds just over 3,500 feet per second, or 2,386 miles per hour, and reach altitudes in excess of 330,000 feet, or 100 kilometers, providing the sensation of weightlessness for 3 to 4 minutes.
More information on the game can be found on the Vanishing Point wiki, while Neowin had a thread of 188 pages at the time of this blog.
Fewer than a thousand people have ever been into space, so if you want to join them, you better sign up and start playing. Let me know how it goes, or just post your thoughts and comments here.
