Game Control HQ at the Rio - morning after

Game Design Stats

Date planning started:       11/01
# of Trips to Vegas:            8

Game Weekend

Game Control Equipment

We selected the Rio hotel as a station for operations, as it boasted suite-sized rooms and easy access to the freeway without a lot of the hassle of traffic on the strip.

Inside our room, all our tracking and telemetry gear was setup, including:

• van tracking gear (visible via projector, installed in vans Fri night)
• web-tracking system that displayed telemetry from teams calling in (also visible via projector)
• telephone call-in system, that automatically transferred calls from function code 42 on the hotline to one of our phones
• "old fashioned" paper-tracking board (shown at left)
• red binders of All Game Knowledge (phone numbers, maps, clues, hints, etc.)

Game Control Headquarters:  Rio Hotel

We had arrived at the Rio Hotel to beautiful weather on Thursday before the Game.  We had secured a storage locker nearby and left much of our equipment since the beta game two weeks earlier.   By Friday evening our Headquarters was completely set...

Here we see the high-tech 100%-cotton projection screen (almost just like NORAD!) that was used to display continuously-updated location information. You can see more detail below.  The tracking information from the GPS transmitters installed in team vans shows on the map in the lower right--at least from the few transmitters that worked. At lower left is the latest reported A# from each team. Chee Chew, director of Portable Debugging Device tech support, is seen on the phone, no doubt guiding a team through one of his fiendish puzzles, or possibly a device bug.

Early morning sun beams into GCHQ as Walter Smith, a.k.a. the Voice of Game Control, tries to be fair and impartial, or possibly just tries to stay awake. Walter's wife Mary-Alice Pomputius, a.k.a. the Reason Game Control Is Even Slightly Organized After 24 Hours, is in the background keeping things organized.