Silver, zinc and lead were discovered at this site in 1887, but it was not until the 1920s that work on this mine really took off, with extensive mining, an aerial tramway, mill and more. The mill infrastructure was significant enough to serve as a filming location for a film starring Roy Rogers! Starting around the 5:28 mark, you can see the mill below (the film quality isn't great, but still gives a good sense of what was there):
• Bells of San Angelo 19...
Now, let’s talk about The Game and Bob Lord…
The origins of The Game supposedly reach back to Los Angeles where, in 1973, a graphic designer named Donald Luskin and a friend, Patrick Carlyle, created non-stop, dusk-to-dawn games solving puzzles across the sprawling Los Angeles metropolitan area. Although these games were mostly an “underground” phenomenon, they eventually caught the attention of the Los Angeles Times, which brought the games to the attention of the Walt Disney Company. Disney created a film, released in 1980, named Midnight Madness, based on the games led by Luskin and Carlyle. Although the film was a commercial failure, it caught the attention of a Florida teenager named Joe Belfiore.
In the early 1980s, Joe and his friends created their own version of the game like the one portrayed in the film. However, they really took it to the next level when Joe moved to California’s Bay Area to attend Stanford University and their game became The Game…
The structure of The Game is essentially that of a scavenger hunt, road race and puzzle-solving challenge that players encounter to take them to a location where another puzzle challenge awaits. Each successfully completed puzzle takes one to a new location. So, one could think of The Game as more of a race. Historically, The Game events always had a story or theme that connected everything.
Joe Belfiore once described The Game as “the ultimate test for Renaissance men and women.”
As the popularity of The Game increased, it brought in more of Silicon Valley’s elite - venture capitalists, tech company founders, executives at large tech firms and more. The Game events took on a new intensity as well, becoming increasingly expensive, high-tech and psychological as each running of The Game tried to outdo the prior events.
Examples I have seen cited include team members being dumped at a strip club after having been relieved of all clothing and possessions and left with nothing but a hospital gown and a clue written in reverse lettering on the back of their necks, being forced to walk around the roof of the Space Needle, having to get a piercing at a tattoo parlor, staged arrests and kidnappings by actors, crashing a gay nightclub where one had to dress in drag and sing “It’s Raining Men” on stage, complex maneuvers involving automatic weapons, helicopters and speed boats… I think you get the idea.
In late October of 2002, a particularly epic hosting of The Game launched in the Las Vegas area, named “Shelby Logan’s Run”. One of the participants was 37-year-old Bob Lord, a software engineer that had worked at Microsoft before starting, and then selling, an internet search company named XYZFind. This was Bob Lord’s first time participating in The Game and he showed up prepared with a wet suit, GPS unit, radios, laptop computer, clothing for any situation. But not a good flashlight...
After a physically and mentally intense run to 16 other clue sites around Las Vegas, the Hoover Dam, an abandoned prison, Goodsprings and others, the sleep-deprived teams were directed to the Argentena (no, that’s not a typo) Mine where the next clue awaited them. The team were told to walk exactly 1,133 feet on a precise compass heading and to find something called 1306. None of the players knew what 1306 was. Well, 1306 was an adit that had “1306” spray painted on it…
However, Bob Lord wanted to scout the route first and climbed up the small hill that you saw at the start of the video. On the way, he recalculated his bearings using his computer and suddenly found himself in front of an adit. For whatever reason, the team decided this was where they should proceed despite “NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO” in orange spray paint by the portal and, perhaps more significantly, the number 1296 in blue (You can see the remains of these in the video). Followed by his team members, Bob led the way into the adit, their only light coming from the screen on his GPS unit…
His team members heard him slip and then heard only silence despite calling out to him. Bob Lord had fallen down the 30-foot hole you see in the video, crushing vertebrae in his neck as well as both of his arms and suffering serious head trauma. Bob was left a quadriplegic and is now blind as a result of the brain damage he suffered.
The Game still continues in various forms, but the bad publicity and extensive litigation following the Bob Lord tragedy emasculated it.
14 окт 2024
