Sauce Policy

The Legend of the Love Bowls

2010-06-14T00:40:00.008-07:00

One of my favorite activities in high school was going skateboarding with my friends. We were always on the lookout for cool new spots to skate. The story of how we found the Holy Grail of skate spots - the Love Bowls - began when I was over at my friend's house one summer day.

The Mystery Ramp
I was hanging out at Joey's house when I noticed a photo hanging on his bedroom wall. He had found it somewhere on the Internet and printed it out. In the photo, a man was skateboarding on a massive concrete ramp in the middle of the desert. The ramp towered over the man and went completely vertical. "That place is somewhere in Arizona, but I don't know where" he explained.

From the time I first saw that photo, I was hooked. What was this giant ramp? Why did it exist? Most important, how was I going to get there? I knew I had to find this place. Unfortunately, the photo contained no clues to the ramp's location.

With no idea where to begin searching, there was not much I could do. Time went by and we both finished high school, but we never forgot about the ramp. By the time I was in my second year of college, a couple of years had passed.

Early Clues
The first big clue came from Joey's next-door neighbor. He was into skateboarding during the late 1970s and he told us that the ramp was actually a semi-circular bowl known as the "Love Bowls." As for the location, it was somewhere up in Carefree, but he wasn't sure exactly where. Armed with this new information, we began our quest to try and find the location of the Love Bowls.

The guys and I spent countless hours searching the Internet for anything related to these "Love Bowls." Only a few of the sites contained any useful information. While searching for information about the Love Bowls, one of us happened upon the website DesertPipes.com.

Desert Pipes is a gold mine of information about the early days of skateboarding in Arizona. The site features photos from the collection of Steve Pingleton, a fellow skateboarder who documented the spots he used to skate with his friends in the 1980s and 1990s. On his website we found a photo from 1991 that showed the semi-circular bowl in its entirety.

Further research revealed that the Love Bowls were built in the late 1960s. They were part of Southwestern Studios, a television studio facility built by CBS to film The New Dick Van Dyke Show. When filming began in 1971, the massive bowls were used as backdrops that could be rotated to catch the sun. The first two seasons of the show did poorly, and the set was moved to California for the third season before being canceled for good in March of 1974.

By now it was 2005 and our search was becoming more and more of an obsession. I came across a 1999 article from the Phoenix Business Journal which claimed that "Carefree Studios, the place where the New Dick Van Dyke show was filmed," had been demolished in order to build a new retail shopping center. Had we been chasing a nonexistent place the whole time?

The article seemed devastating to our goal of finding the Love Bowls. It wasn't the first or last time we would question whether or not they still existed. I still clung to the idea that we would find them one day. After all, the article described Van Dyke's studio as being on Scottsdale Road and said nothing about Carefree. It didn't add up.

Guessing Games
Our next big break came from a skateboarding website called Concrete Disciples. Someone on the message board asked a question about the location of the Love Bowls. Rather than give away the exact location, another person had replied with vague directions in the form of a riddle. The original post no longer exists, but it went something like this:

"The Love Bowls can be found in the town that has no cares. They are visible from the hotel named for the rocks shaped by spheroidal weathering and are across the street from the church."

The post included 4 or 5 very current pictures of the Bowls, the best we had seen yet. There were a number of follow-up posts from people who speculated that the bowls had been torn down or that they were about to be demolished. Still, we were determined to solve the riddle.

The first two clues were pretty easy. The town that has no cares is of course Carefree, Arizona. Carefree is also the location of The Boulders, a famous resort named after an outcrop of giant granite rocks. The guys and I set off for the resort one day in April of 2005. We brought a pair of binoculars and hiked up on some rocks near the hotel, but we could not find anything that looked like the Love Bowls.
Desperate for a better vantage point, the guys and I hiked to the top of Sincuidados Mountain in North Scottsdale. Although the summit was approximately 2,400 feet in elevation, we could see nothing but houses and desert in all directions. The view from the top was pretty awesome, though!

Searching for Answers
The guys and I quickly realized that climbing mountains was not the best way to survey such a large area. We went to the library where they have books of aerial photographs of every section of the city going back 30 years. We found several locations that looked promising and planned to check them out.

One night we ended up lost down some dirt road that did not have any streetlights. Without warning, the road became a dead end quite suddenly. We needed to turn the car around but the slope of the hill we were on made it very tricky. Somehow the car ended up with only 3 wheels touching the ground before it was fully turned around! With our hearts pounding, we couldn't help but laugh once the tension of the situation had faded.

Another time, we ended up at a storage yard for the city's road maintenance department. We knocked on the door of a trailer on site and asked the man inside about the location of the Love Bowls. When we mentioned Dick Van Dyke studios, he said he had heard of the place but wasn't sure exactly where it was. Farther north, he thought. In spite of his enthusiasm, he wasn't much help.

There was another time where we happened upon a fire station and figured that the firemen would know the area pretty well. They invited us inside the station where dinner was cooking and everyone was gathered around the TV playing Xbox, like a big happy family! When asked about the Love Bowls, they responded enthusiastically and gave us very clear directions on how to get there! We went directly to the spot they described and still did not find them!

We explored every side street, dead end, and back road but all we found were water tanks and pump stations. We looked up every church in the area, hoping to find them just across the street. It was starting to feel like we would never find the Love Bowls. Where the hell were they??

By now it was mid-2006 and we had been looking for the Love Bowls off and on for about four years. Maybe they really were gone. At any rate, we couldn't keep up the frenzied pace of searching forever. We continued to skate together and hang out, but our weekends of driving all over Carefree eventually came to an end.

The Breakthrough
In early 2008, I came across a video on YouTube of some kids riding BMX bikes at the Love Bowls. The date on the video was current, and the feeling of excitement about the bowls came rushing back to me for the second time. They had to still be out there somewhere!

During the past few years, the aerial imagery on Google Maps had improved dramatically. One section of land that I had never really noticed before jumped out at me. It had a large object the right shape and size close by where we had been looking. The very next chance I got, I hopped in the car and drove up there to check it out.

I drove to the location I had found on the map and found a place to park. After a short trek through the desert, I spied a large wall off in the distance. I picked up the pace and started moving faster, dodging the bushes and plants that were everywhere.

And just like that, there I was! Standing at the Love Bowls all by myself. It was anti-climactic end to one of the great adventures of my youth. There was no sign, no reward, nobody to slap hands and shout with. Just me and the Love Bowls.

I walked around for a bit and thought about all the time we had spent searching for them. All of the people who said they had been torn down. All of the times we got our hopes up, only to be let down over and over again. It was so great to finally find them until I realized that I didn't even have my skateboard with me!

Conclusion
After the discovery, the guys and I returned to the spot to have a go at riding the bowls. It wasn't as easy as we thought. The steep walls were definitely not designed for skateboards. Still, it was a lot of fun to just be there. We determined that the reason we could not find them before was because of a fenced-in construction project that had blocked the view during our frenzied searching days. With the fence long gone, it was easier to find the bowls which are not visible from the road.

Searching for the Love Bowls was one of the most long and drawn out ordeals I have ever been a part of. Today I look back on it differently, remembering not only the bad parts, but the good times spent in the company of some great friends.

The Prank That Fooled the World

2009-12-09T00:45:00.000-07:00

Please Note: This story is a historical narrative of Internet culture from the year 2002. There are no illegal files anywhere on this site. All links are for additional reference and are not the responsibility of the author.

Today I want to tell you a story about how a group of friends pulled an Internet prank that fooled thousands of people around the world. This prank took place back in 2002, when the Internet was a very different place from what it is today. To better understand the story, some background information is necessary first.

The Web In 2002
Back in 2002 there were no social networking sites, no YouTube, and no Twitter. People communicated with each other using forums and message boards. There were message boards for nearly every type of hobby and interest, from cars and cooking to video games and more. A message board could have anywhere from a few dozen to tens of thousands of users discussing the latest news and events about a particular subject.

Creating a viral video phenomenon in 2002 was not as easy as it is today. Broadband Internet access was not very common back then and many people still accessed the Internet with dial-up modems. Video clips had to be fully downloaded to a user's computer before they could be watched. This required the help of site administrators and moderators who were willing to host the video clip on their server for other users to download.

Today, cable and DSL Internet connections and better video compression allows users to watch "streaming" videos before they are fully downloaded. There are now plenty of free video-hosting sites like YouTube and MetaCafe. Free video hosting sites like these simply did not exist several years ago.

Video Games and Piracy
For as long as there have been video games, there have been people looking for ways to exploit them. In the mid-1990s, hackers figured out that Sony PlayStation games could be copied with an ordinary CD burner, though a grey-market mod chip was required to play the copied games.

Video game hackers hit the jackpot with the Sega Dreamcast in June of 2000. The rip group KALiSTO discovered that Dreamcast games could be compressed from Sega's high-density GD-ROM format to a CD-R disc. The first pirated games required a boot disc swap, though later releases could be played with no hardware modifications at all to the Dreamcast console!

KALiSTO quickly retired from the Dreamcast scene just as ECHELON released its first game, Flag to Flag CART Racing on September 4th, 2000. Game enthusiasts around the world swapped thousands of Dreamcast games using file-sharing programs like Direct Connect. Less than a year later, Sega announced in March of 2001 that its Dreamcast console would be discontinued.

Hackers also sunk their teeth into the Playstation 2, with the first bootleg games appearing online in March of 2001. One of the first homebrew applications was snestation, which originated sometime in 2002. It seemed as though nobody was able to create a game console that was immune to piracy.

Video game manufacturers were keenly aware of the threat of piracy. The latest generation of video game consoles featured the newest anti-piracy technologies to protect games from being copied illegally. The Xbox games were stored on encrypted full size 4.7GB DVDs while the Nintendo GameCube used special 3-inch "Mini DVD" discs with a 1.5GB capacity.

Microsoft released its first game console, the Xbox, on November 15th, 2001. Three days later, the highly-anticipated Nintendo GameCube went on sale. It was the first all-new game console from Nintendo in five years. As soon as the new consoles were released in November of 2001, hackers were already hard at work figuring out ways to reverse-engineer them.

By mid-2002 the budding Xbox and GameCube homebrew communities were coming together while the PS2 homebrew community was really taking off. Thus the stage was set for a group of pranksters to explode on to the scene with a "breakthrough" of their own.

Team BMM
On May 14th, 2002, a video surfaced on the Internet from a group called "Team BMM." No one had ever heard of this mysterious group before, but they claimed to have defeated the copy protection on the Nintendo GameCube.

Their first video was a 3.5 minute clip that showed a man wearing a paintball mask burning a copy of "Super Monkey Ball" on his home computer and playing the game in his GameCube. The video included the song "Good Ol' Days" by Authority Zero and ended with the message "All Your Cube Are Belong To Us: The GameCube Has Been Hacked!"

Five days later on May 19th, 2002, a second video was released by Team BMM. Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir" accompanied the 6.5 minute video in which the same masked stranger burned "Dave Mirra's Freestyle BMX 2" to a miniature disc using an MS-DOS program on his computer. The man then plays the game on a GameCube with no visible modifications.

To dispel any rumors about the authenticity of the hack, the cameraman showed the back of the television to prove there were no other game consoles connected to it. A mirror was placed behind the television while the copied game was played for additional proof.

The third and final video from Team BMM appeared on June 3rd, 2002. In this 5 minute clip, one masked person loads a baked snack cracker into his friend's mouth which is labeled "Pioneer A04." (You may recall that the A04 was one of the first DVD recorders with a 2X write speed. When it debuted in March of 2002 it had a price tag of nearly $400 dollars.)

The video then shows the man playing the game "Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2" from the snack cracker, an obvious fake. The video opens with "My Name is Jonas" by Weezer and finishes with "The Heretic Anthem" by Slipknot as Team BMM engages in a brawl.

Wildfire
The first video released by Team BMM was explosively popular. Gaming forums and message boards came alive with members who had seen the video. Users posted it to other websites and soon the video was being mirrored on several different high-bandwidth sites. The video had received tens of thousands of downloads in the days following its release.

The video was so popular that it made the front page of Lik-Sang, a respected retailer of grey market import and backup devices that was in business from 1998 to 2006. The Team BMM video was also posted to The iSO News, NeoWin.net, Xbox-Scene, and EuroGamer.net. Over 400 people joined the #TeamBMM channel on EFnet (an online chat room) to discuss the videos.

After the second video was released, a TeamBMM website appeared on GeoCities. Here, users could download the "burning software" they saw in the video. The small application was in fact a dummy that appeared to be writing information to a disc, regardless of whether or not a disc was present. The website's bandwidth was exceeded in a matter of hours and GeoCities restricted users from visiting it for the next several days.

By this time the GameCube community had figured out that the videos were staged. The third and final video of the hackers burning the game onto a snack cracker was about as legitimate as President Clinton's press conference in which he stated he "did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky." By the time the third video was released, it was too late. The first two videos would continue to fool people on gaming forums and message boards for several more weeks.

Aftermath
There were those who doubted Team BMM from the very beginning, and they were right. The Team BMM videos used clever editing to fool viewers into thinking they were copying GameCube games with ease. Once it was confirmed that the videos were fake, site administrators deleted them from their servers and people were unable to download them. With the videos unavailable, no more people were able to view them and believe them and the incident was quickly forgotten.

Stories about video game piracy would continue to make headlines for the rest of 2002. In July, just two months after the Team BMM video craze, an anonymous donor offered a $200,000 dollar prize to anyone who could get Linux to run on the Microsoft Xbox. Less than a month later, the Xbox Linux Project announced that it had succeeded in booting the console to a fully-controllable network-enabled state. The floodgates of the Xbox homebrew community were now open.

The Nintendo GameCube's protection was finally defeated in 2003. An exploit was discovered in the game Phantasy Star Online that allowed hackers to connect a GameCube to a PC using a broadband adapter and load small amounts of data to it. Soon afterwards, they were able to extract game data to ISO images that were released online. The first fully playable game to be ripped for the GameCube was Animal Crossing. By the end of 2003, the last anti-piracy measures had been defeated and video game consoles were wide open to modifications.

Closing Thoughts
So what's the point of all this? The point is that you should never underestimate the power of smart people with video cameras. While the impact that Team BMM had on the gaming community was not long-lasting, it was incredibly far reaching for such a short period of time. The other message is that you shouldn't believe everything you hear, especially on the Internet! The only people who remember Team BMM today are those who were part of it, and yes, we are still laughing about it!

Sauce Policy

2009-09-09T19:55:00.000-07:00

This is it for now, this is either the beginning, the end, or something in between...