A Day in the Life of Sam Fisher
It was Saturday March 27th, 2010, the temperature was 5 degrees and the sun was shining bright. 40 teams, each consisting of 2 people, arrived on the Canadian National Exhibition grounds, in Toronto, to report for the Inside Splinter Cell Conviction Challenge.
After we registered for the event, we were provided with a sling backpack which was full of supplies. Inside the bag we were given a Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) day pass, a $50 dollar pre-paid visa card, a mirror, a fake ID, snacks, water, TTC map, and a pen and paper. We were told to report back at 3:30pm for debriefing. Once the debriefing started, we were greeted by members of the Xbox team who explained the rules of the competition. Christophe Grand-Jean came on stage to tell us about the grand prize which was a trip to Montreal, where you would get the chance to hang out with the Splinter Cell development team and the opportunity to play the game with the team.
That was it, all the teams raced out to the lobby to get the first clue and there official Xbox 360 Splinter Cell jackets. Johnny Rotten73 and I formed an alliance with Mister Switch and his partner IvIxANTHMANxIvI . We dashed quickly up Bathurst Street to King to catch the King streetcar eastbound to a local Russian Vodka Bar, Pravda. Our challenge was to get information from Ivan, a local Russian Mafia member. It wasn’t easy, we had to head back out on to the street to find Vlad and ruffle a few feathers to get some information from him. We met back up with Ivan where he gave us our final challenge in the form of an image. We had to locate, using the image, a bottle of liquor and record the size of the bottle, percentage of alcohol and the country of origin. We gave this information to Ivan and he stamped our passport, Challenge 1 in Soviet Russia completed.
We only needed to complete 3 of the 4 challenges so we skipped the Mark and Execute challenge and because challenge number 4, Isabella, was geographically closest we decided to head there. We checked in using our new identities, mine being Edward Flaspoehler. We waited in our room for a few minutes and got a phone call with the information we were waiting for. We cautiously made it to the Employee’s only basement, where we met someone who was tortured and tied up and needed serious medical attention. We gave him the little rations we had and he told us that reception was holding a package for room 304; we had what we needed to know! We got our package and got our passport stamped.
Then, we dashed west across town to Bathurst and Queen and snuck into the Burroughes Furniture store. Once inside, we had to carefully maneuver through the security office making sure not to wake the security guard in order to obtain a visitors pass. Once acquired, we ran up flights of stairs to the rooftop where we needed to locate vital information that was located on the side of a building. We than made it down to the 4th floor, where we needed to dodge security, hop on the elevator and dash around the back of the building to get our passport stamped.
That was it; it was time to get to the final destination, EB games at Bathurst and Bloor. We checked in and since we did not complete the Mark and Execute challenge we needed to locate a game that had the following UPC 6178962, which happened to be Avatar. We got our final clue, ran to the subway station and headed to Downsview station. Our new mission, locate the Splinter Cell Bus line. It was a long and agonizing 25 minute subway ride. Our minds ran through questions like, how many teams had made it the final destination? Where there any other teams on the subway with us? We made it! We were team 4 of 6 to qualify for the final challenge. We had to sit and wait on the TTC bus for the final 2 teams to show up and qualify. We waited for approximately 45 minutes and then took a quick 8 minute bus ride to our final destination. The only information we were told was that we were going to be locked up in a jail cell and tortured while the other 34 teams watched on.
So we waited for over an hour in our cell, then finally a riot occurred and we managed to escape our cells for a brief minute. We headed across the hall to the other cells, where we saw a bunch of numbers written on the wall. We quickly jotted these down and returned to our cells before the prison warden caught us and put us in the hole. A package was slipped into our cell and we had to decipher the numbers along with all the information we collected throughout our challenges to solve the puzzle.
Sadly, we couldn’t crack the code in time another team won. Congratulations to the winners, who took off in style… in a helicopter!
It was a long, physically and mentally exhausting day. As I sit here and write this piece, my body aches all over. I can barely walk around my apartment. I now know what Sam Fisher goes through on any mission and I’m really looking forward to playing Splinter Cell Conviction on April 13th 2010.
Thanks to all that organized the event it was a true blast to participate in.
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