Electronic Arts and BioWare launched their first two copies of Mass Effect 3: Space Edition to the upper atmosphere via weather balloon Thursday, but re-entry didn’t quite go as planned.
The two games, launched from San Francisco’s Lincoln Park area, drifted about an hour south into Butano State Park and fell back to Earth. The idea was that excited fans could track the balloons using on-board GPS transmitters using the masseffect.com/space website, then run out and snag the early copies as part of a contest. Instead, the first two launches of “space” copies wound up stuck in huge Pacific Northwest trees.
An EA recovery team was dispatched to the landing sites early Friday morning, where they reported finding about 10 eager fans on-hand, who were working to dislodge a copy that had landed in a tree about 150 feet in the air — to no avail.
The recovery team attempted a few high-tech means of rescuing the crashed console copies of Mass Effect 3, including “rope tied to baseball” and “tree-shaking.” As of this writing, at least one copy remains trapped high above the park floor.
On the plus side, at least the two balloons didn’t veer directly into the San Francisco Bay. Ask THQ how that works out for a promo. Still, the turn of events that find the ME3 copies out of reach and the contest waylaid seem entirely…predictable. (Also, a weather balloon can’t actually reach space. It’s impossible. But I digress.)
More Space Edition launches are planned for today and next week, starting at 10:30 PST. The next two launches will take place in Las Vegas, where fans should find game retrieval a little easier, given that Las Vegas is surrounded by desert.
If you want to participate in the contest to chase down an early copy of Mass Effect 3, hit masseffect.com/space and sign up. You’ll need an Origin account. The next launch is scheduled for Feb. 25 in New York. Next week, three launches will take place in Europe, starting with London.
You can see the progress of the retrieval effort in San Francisco on the Mass Effect Facebook page. EA says that after it rescues the stranded copies, it’ll be giving them away.
Source: Gaming Today
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