NASHVILLE, Tennessee (AP) -- As computer programmer Shane Messer watched U.S. forces look for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the search struck him as a perverse sort of treasure hunt.
Messer has always been obsessed with puzzles, riddles and games, and he decided he wanted to join the hunt -- if only in an imaginary, computer-geeky kind of way.
So he created an international treasure hunt called "Find Those Weapons: The Hunt for the Real WMD" by using actual public documents related to the American invasion as clues.
Messer's treasure? A solid gold trophy, a bag of cash and a barrel of oil.
"I sat down and created a hunt with real documents off public domain sites and started putting the puzzle together over time and it became a very complex thing," said Messer, 28, of Nashville.
The game he created, which started shipping this week for $39.99 a copy, is also a clever piece of self-promotion that Messer hopes might generate enough profits to put him through law school.
The game includes a booklet with 10 clues and a master clue; a map of Iraq; and a CD-ROM that contains 3,000 public documents, leaflets dropped in Iraq and text transcripts.
Messer expects people to use the documents from the CD to decipher the 10 clues, which are in the form of rhyming riddles. The 10 answers help players solve the master clue, which directs them to the "WMD" trophy.
"I want people to go through these documents and really understand how much media and text is involved in this whole thing," Messer said.
The treasure at the end of Messer's hunt is a 14k gold trophy that has been appraised at $6,632 by a Nashville jeweler. The single winner also gets 10 percent of the profits and a barrel of oil.
Messer has hidden replicas of the real trophy in 65 major U.S. cities and four in the United Kingdom. Whoever finds a replica will be given instructions on how to trade it in for the real prize -- but the winner must be able to explain how he or she deduced the answer.
It may sound like the game has a political subtext -- a satire of the hunt that has thus far found no real WMDs in Iraq. If no one finds the trophy by Election Day 2004, Messer will send the gold and the barrel of oil to President Bush.
But Messer said he has no agenda. He calls himself "a slightly liberal Republican" who believes there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but he's not sure if America will ever find them.
Messer said his only real goal is to make money and pay for his legal education. He plans to attend Concord Law School, a Los Angeles-based program that is the first completely online law program.
