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Colorado Web Designer Wins 'WMD' Treasure Hunt Game

Posted on: Thursday, 9 September 2004, 06:00 CDT

By COLIN FLY

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) -- A 26-year-old Web designer from Pueblo, Colo., had better luck than the inspectors who failed to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

It took seven months, but Tristan Walker won a treasure hunt called "Find Those Weapons: The Hunt for the Real WMD."

The prize was a 14k gold "WMD" trophy appraised at more than $6,600 and a barrel of oil - olive, not crude. Walker also got $1,400 in cash and another $1,400 donated to the charity of his choice.

Shane Messer, a 29-year-old from Nashville, invented and sold about 1,000 copies of the $39.95 game to pay for law school. "Find Those Weapons" included a booklet of clues, a map of Iraq and a CD-ROM with 3,000 public documents, leaflets dropped in Iraq and transcripts.

Walker got the game as a birthday gift in March and soon realized that the clues "all coincide with books from Dr. Seuss, which was kind of odd and intriguing at the same time," Walker said. "If you look at the books, and then find out what each book is about ... you come up with 10 different words from the 10 different clues."

The clues sent him to the eBay auction site.

"There was a seller on there named Momma Hussein, and if you look at what she was selling, she was selling a painting and the description talks about all of this stuff."

Walker's eBay bid on the imaginary painting let Messer know there was a winner.

Messer plans to release a new treasure hunt game in November: an imaginary search for Osama bin Laden.

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