One of the "Space Edition" copies of the new game Mass Effect 3, which are currently being ballooned up into space by publisher Electronic Arts from San Francisco and other cities, has landed 150 feet up in a tree in the woods north of Santa Cruz.
10 fans arrived at the landing destination shortly thereafter, following a GPS tracker on the game's official web site.
With the tree far too high to climb, the treasure hunters were forced to improvise a method of bringing the balloon down to them by fashioning what BioWare described on its Twitter account as a "baseball attached to rope." Unfortunately, that strategy proved ineffective, so fans used slingshots and marbles in an effort to retrieve the games.
With the second day of launches already under way in Las Vegas, Nevada, fans have more opportunities to hunt down their own copies of Mass Effect 3 "Space Edition" before the contest's final launch on February 29 in Berlin, Germany.
Using advanced GPS tracking devices and high-altitude weather balloons mounted with HD cameras, BioWare launched two separate payloads containing retail copies of Mass Effect 3 into outer space from San Francisco, California at 7 a.m. and 9 a.m. on Thursday morning.
The weather balloons carried the Mass Effect 3 games up from San Francisco and into the Earth's upper atmosphere as part of a worldwide scavenger hunt in which fans can track down copies of the game as they land back on Earth in cities including Las Vegas, New York, London and Berlin.
By logging on to the Mass Effect 3 Space Edition website, people can watch the flight paths of the Mass Effect 3 payloads displayed on Google Maps in real time.
So where exactly did the San Francisco balloons go? After entering outer space at an altitude of 10,000 feet, the two weather balloons followed a similar trajectory, traveling south of San Francisco, past cities including San Mateo and Cupertino.
