The Game Puzzle Hunt Incident | A Short Documentary | Fascinating Horror

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.

Channel: Fascinating Horror

Views: 1,681,386

Keywords: Bob Lord, Puzzle Hunt, Accident, Incident, Microsoft, The Game, Shelby Logan's Run, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco, Freak Accident, Weirdest Accidents, Horror, True Horror, Weird Deaths, Darwin Award, Ways To Die, Shelby Logan, Logan's Run, Weird Accident, Storytelling, Horror Story, Horror Storytelling, History, Nerd, Geek, Nerd History, Video Game History, Game History, Jacque Lord, Disabled, Treasure Hunt, Escape Room, Bay Area, Amazing Race, Midnight Madness

Id: uL5AWmm5wbU

Length: 9min 3sec (543 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 27 2020