Things we like: halting environmentally harmful development projects, healthy waterways, online timesucks, and free booze. So Save The Bay, thanks bunches for your new fundraising Internet game — but in the future, thanksmuch for staying out of our heads, regardless of the potential benefits of whatever mind reading technology you’ve got your benevolent little mitts on.
At the risk of revealing the pathway to our sasstivist hearts, meet Battle for the Bay. It’s Save The Bay’s newest gizmo, giving water-loving point-and-clickers the chance to journey from the 1960s (when the bay advocacy group was founded) to present day times, all the while besting historically accurate environmental menaces to our local lands, from David Rockefeller’s 1970s bid to level the San Bruno Mountains and create a Manhattanized version of the San Mateo County shoreline, to the Costco Busan spill, to Cargill’s current ploy to transform 1,436 acres of Redwood City salt ponds to suit its freaky agribusiness needs. (Coincidentally, Save The Bay is not in favor of this plan.)
You’ll never get your stubby fingers on Bair Island, 1980s Mobil man!
And it’s not just an opportunity to crusade against cartoonized powers that be! Trivia questions give you a chance to brush up on your ephemeral wisdom of the Bay Area (from brothel main drags to historical transportation lines), and there are prizes: the Bay city with the most players will win a free happy hour at a watering hole in their ‘hood.
Genius. “We worked with Free Range Studios to design the game,” says Cara Longpre, online communications manager at Save the Bay. “We heart them.” (You’ll heart them too after watching The Meatrix, the company’s viral video hit from 2003).
Other people Longpre hearts: George A. Miller and Janet McKinley, two longtime Save The Bay members who’ve agreed to front up to $10,000 in $1 increments each time you (you!) click over to the site to defeat the evil Pete Wilson beast.
So quick, go! We’ve already lost 90 percent of our tidal marsh to development. And we want our free happy hour, dammit. Longpre told us not to count our chickens before we hatch on that one, but hey, we know some people in the media.