Dig for Gold within Virtual Earth

In Australia the NineMSN team has just launched Goldrush – a big initiative to propel search usage.  You can access the game from www.ninemsn.com.au or go direct to www.goldrushgame.com.au

The Goldrush game was developed to drive Live Search queries by engaging users in a fun interactive activity that rewarded interaction with big prizes.  There are 3,500 prizes up for grabs worth over $250 000!  Gamers answer trivia questions, with help from Live Search, to earn the chance to ‘dig’ for prizes on a map of Australia (it consists of a million pixels).  Prizes have been randomly placed under certain pixels.

The massive prize pool includes a Holden Captiva SUV worth $42,000, $25,000 cash, JVC TVs and camcorders, actual Gold Bullion, Motorola phones, Xbox 360 Packs ... and much more. 

How do you play????

1 – Users compete in a rounds of trivia questions to earn ‘digs’  - each round of 5 multiple choice questions must be successfully completed in 60 seconds.  If any question is answered incorrectly, users must begin again.

2 – This is where Live Search comes into play.  At anytime users can select the ‘HINT’ button which displays Live search results related to the answer and also gain an extra 10 seconds on the clock.  Each time the HINT is selected, a Live Search query is generated.

3 – Once successfully completing a round users have the option to ‘dig now’ or to play on for more chances. (1 round = 1 dig, 2 rounds = 3 digs, 3 rounds = 5 digs, 4 rounds = 10 digs). Clicking ‘dig now’ takes the user to a map of Australia that can be viewed via the control panel in map or satellite views. Users can use location controls to scroll around and zoon in on Australia and see other players digs:- gold= winning digs, red=empty digs, blue= your past digs. 

So, play and go wins some cool stuff.

CP