Geocities lives on!
Using a $286,000 grant from the Department of Homeland Security, The Illinois Terrorism Task Force (ITTF) and the Illinois Emergency Management Agency (IEMA) have made a computer game to teach kids along the New Madrid fault line about earthquake preparedness. The game is called “The Day the Earth Shook” and also has a website which looks worse than the novelty sites I would make for the hell of it at 3 a.m. in 1999 using freeware and minimal html skills.
The downloadable game is part of the State of Illinois’ plans to prepare their residents for a quake triggered by the New Madrid fault line. If a level 7 or 8 quake were to hit the area it could impact 15 million people, according to the website. As part of the “Great Central U.S. Shakeout” the state received a $286,000 grant to create and put the earthquake game online. The money went to the University of Illinois’s visualization lab which created the game with the help of scientists from the University of Illinois Champaign at the National Center for Supercomputing applications. [Kotaku]
In the game, you play a kid who is given magic glasses by an alien (let’s just gloss over that, since there’s no explanation anyway) and then you walk around looking for items for an earthquake preparedness kit and find the best and worst places to be during an earthquake. A couple more screencaps of this, um, amazing game and website are after the jump. Just try not to think about how many free cancer screenings, albuterol rescue inhalers, packs of birth control, and school textbooks could be bought with $283K, leaving $3000 left to pay a DeVry student to make this same game and slap together a website.