As anticipation for EA and Bioware’s epic conclusion to the Mass Effect saga balloons to atmospheric-breaking levels, EA is giving the chance to fans of the franchise to play the game more than a week early – but not in the way you’d have imagined.

While the demo gave us all an early taster of what to expect from Commander Shepard’s final confrontation with the Reapers, EA is now planning to launch full copies of the game -- released globally on March 6^th for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 –- into space. The publisher will be sending an unspecified number of Mass Effect 3 boxed copies, referred to as the plucky ‘Space Edition’, into the mute blackness of space via weather balloons, before plummeting to terra firma and, presumably, into lucky gamers’ consoles later on that evening.

Each copy is said to have a GPS device attached in order for the company to track the games’ whereabouts (the locations of which will be available via the official Mass Effect website also). EA has named San Francisco, Las Vegas, Berlin, London, New York and Paris as the targeted cities of choice. For those of you lucky enough to be living in such cosmopolitan areas of the world, keep you eyes trained to the sky – the future of our universe depends on it, fictionally speaking of course.