Ubisoft is spending a lot of money on a competition which promises to let one person become the first to ever play a video game on Mt Everest, using custom hardware built to withstand the "harsh conditions". It sounds amazing! Pity it's already been done.

As this epic thread bump on NeoGAF shows (the original Kotaku link is so old it doesn't even work anymore), back in 2005 we told you about an expedition to the summit of the world's tallest mountain undertaken by Neal Mueller.


Neal and his colleagues took a bunch of electronics up the mountain with them. And only one device withstood the conditions. As he explained at the time:

We totally had so much electronic equipment, and Id say the Nintendo DS held up the best of any of it. We were using a CB radio to stay in touch and that would consistently go bad then wed bring it back to life. It was because of the wind and the cold, we had a Dell computer that got fried, a Polytechnic screen that went out we had three of the four MP3 players go bad, but the Nintendo DS units keep hanging in there. And it was the Nintendo DS units that suffered the worst of it - they were constantly with us in our tents which were moist and cold the were right there in our packs so they suffered a lot of wind blasts, they were dropped. And the Sherpas would beat the (heck) out of them - theyd play with them in the kitchen where curry would get split on them, all these incredibly hot spices and they kept on performing.


Instead of going to all the trouble of building special hardware, I wonder if it'd be cheaper for Ubisoft to just port Far Cry 4 to the DS...