Oil Spill Cleanup: You vs. Exxon

Oil Spill Cleanup: You vs. Exxon

An advertisement for the board game "On the Rocks: The Great Alaska Oil Spill," created by Richard Lynn, a Valdez bartender and participant in oil-spill cleanup efforts. The game pitted players against each other in a race-against-the-clock: whoever navigated his or her game piece along "200 miles of oil-covered coastline" the fastest - using an available budget of $250 million - won the contest. At the time of this advertisement, the game had sold 1,300 copies for $16.69 - the typical wage for a cleanup worker. In Exxon's real-life restoration efforts, the corporation spent $2.5 billion and employed 11,000 workers from the time of the accident through 1992.

Laurie Kretchmar

Fortune Magazine