high-altitude-balloons

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  • Marketing zenith reached: Early copies of Mass Effect 3 on weather balloons

    by 
    Jordan Mallory
    Jordan Mallory
    02.16.2012

    You guys know about Mass Effect 3, right? EA really wants you to know that Mass Effect 3 exists. Like, so bad. The publisher's fervor for raising awareness about ME3 is so great that it's strapping six copies of the game to six high-altitude weather balloons spread across the globe, and launching them into the literal stratosphere, which is effectively space when spoken in the same sentence as "balloons" and "video games."Paris, London, Berlin, New York, San Francisco and Las Vegas will all play host to one of these advertising airships, which are set to launch next week. Eventually though, these puppies are coming back down.Each copy of the game is equipped with a GPS tracking device, and crazy people will be able to monitor the games' positions on the official Mass Effect website. Once they land, whoever scrambles to a crash site first will get to keep the copy and play the game a week early, assuming the damn thing is still somehow intact. Here's hoping that the balloons are just as involved in the descent as they are in the flight, but just to be safe we're going to calculate the terminal velocity of a 360 case and call our insurance company.