Our team travels in a huge 15-passenger van.
We arrived at the Roxie Theater on 16th Street in San Francisco to find several other team vans double-parked outside the theater, plus one two-seater Porsche convertible, in which team Red 5 (Jeff Stribling and his co-GC from the Megahard game) would play all weekend. Word has it that they did 70 mph on Skyline Boulevard at 3:00 am in the fog, so what they lacked in manpower they made up for in speed.
We left our van with the valet parker (=volunteer from GC), not knowing when we would see it again. In fact, we were to travel to the next three clues via public transportation, which was cool. The Roxie is at 16th Street between Mission and Valencia, and there's a BART station at 16th & Mission. Without giving too much away, the first three clue locations were all within a short walk from a BART station, so we got around quite nicely without our van.
So, before we left our van, we loaded up our daypacks with things we thought we would need, such as the Matrix DVD, our Japanese character set, a SF Muni map, and of course a couple of laptops, and then went into the theater. When all the teams had arrived, there were sixteen teams.
After a few minutes, four men in dark sunglasses and black trenchcoats silently strode down the aisle and mounted the stage.
GC stayed in character throughout the presentation. After some introductory remarks setting the theme of the Matrix, they got to the business at hand - the Java video game, which was projected at huge size onto the screen of the theater. The deal was that teams would get to leave and start the real game in the order in which their game agents finished the Java game.
Charlie had programmed our game agent using a genetic algorithm and at first we did great, but then our agent started to falter as it ran out of energy. We started out in about fifth place and ended, I think, in eleventh.
There was an all-female team there whom we had never seen, but we figured that since we had only played in one previous game, we wouldn't know all of the teams anyway. These women were dressed all in red, and in fact their team name was Women in Red. And their game agent kicked ass! They got to leave first. Being the only female on my team of six, I was silently cheering them on (Girl Power!).
When our agent finally solved all 20 clues about 10 minutes later (although it seemed an eternity as we watched other teams whooping and dashing out of the theater), we got up and left by the side door, and were given the first clue.