You better stay away from the killer Mercedes

There are plenty of relaxing things to do in Zürich, Switzerland. You can visit the opera house, take a walk by the lake, or gorge yourself on chocolate and luxury watches. Alternatively, you could spend the day being chased around the city by a Mercedes in a frantic game of “Assassin.”

Well, you could if you were in town this past May 29. On that day, thanks to a partnership between Swiss “mixed-reality game studio” Gbanga, Mercedes-Benz, and Jeff Communications, the streets of Zürich turned into a giant manhunt. More than 3,200 players scattered throughout the streets of the city to evade a “hunter” stalking them in a Mercedes-Benz CLA Shooting Brake.

No, the car didn’t actually mow anybody down. Instead, each contestant was required to download an app, which kept track of their location via GPS and showed them where the predatory car was in real time on a map. If a player got too close to the car, their energy meter would run down. Once that energy meter hit 0 percent, players were “dead” and out of the game.

The last player standing—Zürich’s own Markus Liechti, who survived the competition with just 2.8 percent of his energy left to spare—won the car that chased everyone around the city. In German, the game was called “Gross. Stadt. Jagd,” which directly translates to “Big. City. Hunting,” although Gbanga and its partners are simply referring to it as “Urban Hunting” in English.

The car wasn’t the only threat to each player’s virtual health, either: Players could drop invisible bombs throughout the playing field to sabotage other participants, there were “natural disasters” that depleted everyone’s health meter in parts of the city, and the boundaries of the playing field shrunk over time.

But there were beneficial goodies, too: Power-ups that boosted your health, gave players temporary invincibility cloaks, shrunk the danger-zone radius for the car, and identified safe houses that players could camp out inside. There were also opportunities for non-players to vote on the direction the car would go next.

Being chased is hard work. According to Gbanga game producer Matthias Sala, one player traveled seven miles during the competition. In aggregate, all the game’s participants trekked a whopping 3,045 miles during the game.