If you love scaring mom by putting weird objects in her bed, you’ll want to win Ripley’s upcoming web game.
Ripley’s Believe It or Not! began as a newspaper comic feature in the early 20th century and grew to become a franchise made of books, radio shows, museums, television shows, and videogames that deal with oddities and facts seemingly too outlandish to be true. Ripley’s Tom O’Brien stopped by Kotaku to detail the company’s first online web game, Zon8, which will reward winners with actual shrunken heads.
Sadly, by shrunken heads I don’t mean $10,000. I really do mean shrunken heads. Zon8 will go live in June and task players to make it through eight different levels of “The Vault,” a cavernous warehouse of freaky objects. Solving puzzles and discovering hidden artifacts will be necessary to achieve mini-head worthiness. For example, O’Brien said that players might “have to find a hidden shoe from the world’s tallest man.” I’m not making the connection; wouldn’t it be much harder to find the shoe of the man with the smallest feet?
The first 10 players to win Zon8 will each receive a shrunken head custom made by the Ripley’s F/X Department, while the next 40 will win a Ripley’s book. If you’re totally baffled by the odd grand prize being offered, it has to do with the history of the franchise. The founder of Ripley’s, Robert Ripley, would travel the world to find strange objects, and the shrunken head became a prominent member of his collection. His were real too, believe it or not!
Supposedly, Zon8 will take six to eight hours to complete. This means that someone on the internet will have it finished between one to five minutes after it goes live. People can sign up for Zon8 email notifications here, which will let everybody know when registrations open.
Source: Kotaku
Published: May 19, 2010 01:23 am