The Game (treasure hunt)

The Game is a non-stop 24- to 48-hour treasure hunt, puzzlehunt or road rally that has run in the San Francisco Bay and Seattle areas.

Teams in games have been required to walk around the roof of the Space Needle, find a puzzle hidden in a live rat, and circulate a petition to ban dihydrogen monoxide from local ecosystems while dressed in superhero outfits.

[2] In 1985 Joe Belfiore (at that time a student at Clearwater Central Catholic High School) and his friends, inspired by Midnight Madness, created a race like the one in the film.

With Stanford classmates Eli Ben-Shoshan and Andrew Reisner, he created the Bay Area Race Fantastique (BARF) which occurred six times before changing its name to 'The Game'.

Currently, versions of The Game (both full-blown and abbreviated foot-transportation-only) are organized regularly by Stanford dorm staff members as a bonding activity for their residents.

This nature of self-policing (decentralized control and word-of-mouth) prevents out-of-control teams from destroying the elaborate events.

Different Area Same Hunt, or DASH, the Game featured puzzles created by teams in Boston, MA, Washington, DC, Houston, TX, Los Angeles, CA, Palo Alto and San Francisco, CA, Portland, OR, and Seattle, WA.

[5] In the 2002 Game, "Shelby Logan's Run", player Bob Lord was severely injured after misunderstanding a clue and falling thirty feet down a disused mineshaft.

Arriving at the site from an unexpected direction, Lord mistakenly entered mineshaft 1296, not realising that the mines were numbered, and ignored anonymous, spraypainted warnings assuming that they were part of the game.

The fall crushed several vertebrae and left Lord a quadriplegic, and a lawsuit was filed against the organisers of that year's Game, who were criticized for not mentioning the danger in the pre-game liability waiver.