Description
Dundee is famous for quite a few things (read the description of Team Clova's most excellent A Beano Cache - GCPGA5 - for a good list) but one aspect of this city's history and present that has not appeared yet on geocaching is... video games!
This series will take you on a wee tour of Dundee to visit a few of the areas related to the industry. Dundee's gaming industry began in the 70s when Timex and NCR were based here. Clive Sinclair's ZX80 computer was made by the city's Timex plant. Since those days the city has been the birthplace of several game franchises - most notably Lemmings and Grand Theft Auto.
We begin our tour at the University of Abertay Dundee, home of the Institute of Arts, Media and Computer Games, where the next generation of games developers get a taste of what it means to make games. It's also home to Dare to be Digital, the UK's premier video games production competition. The top games developed at Dare are nominated to the Ones to Watch Award at the annual Video Games BAFTAs.
The coordinates point to the principal university building. To locate the actual coordinates of this cache (and the other caches in this series) you must... play Lemmings!
To find out more about Lemmings, a good place to look is the Wikipedia article. It's a puzzle-platformer game developed by DMA design here in Dundee, and a worldwide hit which most gamers remember fondly. Another cache in this series will take you to where it all began!
Let's Go!
To solve this you'll need to go to the free online version of Lemmings (created by a fan). You can find it here.
Ok, so we lied, you don't actually need to play the game for this cache, but I'd give it a go if you never have! Instructions on how to play can be found here. You'll need to play for cache #2 of the series anyway so might as well practice :]
You'll find four difficulties: Fun, Tricky, Taxing and Mayhem. Each difficulty has 10 levels to play. If you select a difficulty you'll see a list of the levels for that difficulty, along with the access code for the first level shown.
Map each letter of the alphabet to it's numerical position (i.e a=1, b=2, c=3, etc..)
If you look at the access code for Mayhem, level 1:
A = the 6th letter
B = the 4th letter
Now look at the access code for Tricky, level 1:
C = the 3rd letter
D = the 9th letter
Finally, the access code for Fun, level 1:
E = the 8th letter
F = the 2nd letter
Cache is at N56° 27.ABC, W2° 58.DEF. Good hunting!
Once found, if you're heading to cache #2 in the series, you can take West Bell Street (waypoint DENKI) for a better view of the University. You might also see the offices of Denki games on your left (you'll notice their logo on the windows)