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 since 1973. Its teams use vans rigged with power and Internet access and drive hundreds of miles from puzzle site to puzzle site, overcoming often outrageous physical and mental challenges along the way, usually with no sleep. Teams in recent 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.

Game founder Joe Belfiore has described the Game as "the ultimate test for Renaissance men and women."

The earliest roots of The Game can be found in games created in Los Angeles in 1973 by a graphic designer named Donald Luskin and longtime friend, Patrick Carlyle. Teams competed all night long solving puzzles across L.A. for a $100 first prize. The game was a mostly underground affair, but eventually drew the attention of the Los Angeles Times. and later the Walt Disney Company, who produced a movie, Midnight Madness, based on Luskin's game.

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. They played four more games before Joe moved to Stanford University to go to school. 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'. There are some interesting notes about the initial BARFs and number of teams that actually completed them due to the hyper-competitive aspect of the BARF format. The term "Gentleman's Game" was used to describe the Stanford Game shortly after Joe Belfiore graduated, meaning there was no prize for winning, only bragging rights.

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