Beachie ❤ 1980s is a series of caches themed around the 1980s, located around Peterborough City Centre. The caches are intended to provide a variety of hides and types, so there'll be something for everyone.
Each cache is related to a different 1980s thing pertinent to a different year of the decade. We've tried to tie the themes in to the location where we can. In addition, there are some bonus caches. These aren't bonus caches in the geocaching sense of information to find one cache contained within other caches. They're just extra caches we added as we ended up with more ideas than years in the decade.
All the caches in the series are "stand-alone" in that they don't require you to complete any others. You can do them all in one sitting or just dip in and do one or two at a time as your time permits. You also don't need to do them in chronological or any other particular order - do them in whatever order works for you.
Click on elements of the magazine above to see the caches in the series. Alternatively, go to this bookmark list...
1980... this happened... Ronald Reagan elected US President... 83 million people tune in to find out who shot JR in Dallas... Hi-De-Hi is broadcast for the first time... The Second Star Wars film, The Empire Strikes Back, is released... John Lennon is murdered... The Walkman personal music player is released... Metal Mickey appears on TV for first time... The Olympics take place in Moscow...
...and the iconic video game, Pac-Man, is released!
Pac-man is one of the most influential computer games of all time. Its titular character was the first original gaming mascot, the game established the maze chase game genre, it demonstrated the potential of characters in video games, it opened gaming to female audiences. In addition, it was the first video game to feature power-ups, and the individual ghosts had deterministic artificial intelligence which react to player actions. It is also frequently credited as the first game to feature cut scenes, in the form of brief comical interludes about Pac-Man and Blinky the ghost chasing each other around during those interludes.
Pac-man was created over the course of a year by a team led by named Toru Iwatani. It was based on the concept of eating, and the original Japanese title is Pakkuman, inspired by the Japanese onomatopoeic phrase paku-paku taberu where paku-paku describes the sound of the mouth movement when widely opened and then closed in succession.
Although Iwatani has repeatedly stated that the character's shape was inspired by a pizza missing a slice, he admitted in a 1986 interview that this was a half-truth and the character design also came from simplifying and rounding out the Japanese character for mouth, kuchi.
The cache is not located at the above co-ordinates. You will need to ensure you have the means to play wherigo cartridges in the field. For more information visit http://www.wherigo.com. If you're unfamiliar with Wherigo caches may I suggest you read that site thoroughly.
The cartridge you will need to download can be found here.
For this cache we’ve turned Peterborough city centre into a giant Pac-Man maze, where the paths of the maze are the actual city centre streets! In-the video game, players move around the maze, eating “pac-dots” whilst trying to avoid being eaten by the ghosts. Ours is a geocaching version – you’re travelling round looking for caches, whilst trying to avoid the muggles.
Earn points for every cache you find, with rarer cache types such as earthcaches earning most points. Look out for the hidden virtual caches too, with a special bonus attached. Watch out for the muggles though – if you get muggled, you’ll lose a life; run out of lives and you’ll have to start again.
If you earn enough points, you’ll be rewarded with the final cache coordinates. Once you reach this point, you can either stop playing to find the cache or carry on and beat your high score.
For clarity, the caches you're chasing in the game are imaginary electronic ones, and bear no relation to the location of caches in the real world!
The extent of the "maze" is roughly from Fitzwilliam Street in the north down to the bottom end of Bridge Street in the south, and from the westernmost extent of Cowgate in the west to the easternmost end of Brook Street in the east. The final cache may or may not lie inside this area.
We've set the start co-ordinates here in Cathedral Square arbitrarily - you can start from anywhere in the "maze".
The cache has been field-tested on a phone that keeps the doctor away. It took approximately 45 minutes to play out the cache in our test - but Mr BH was walking VERY briskly as it was throwing it down that day! Results may vary significantly, because you’re not following a specific route and can carry on playing long after you’ve done enough to complete the cache. Therefore please be prepared to do a significant amount of walking.
Please take care at all times while playing the game, especially with geokids and geodogs. Obey the normal rules of the road and any traffic signals etc when crossing roads.
Please make an educated decision about the level of muggle activity when you arrive at GZ, and if you find it's just too muggly, we'd suggest you return another time - we'd rather you protected the cache. Thank you.