six to start

We’re really excited to announce the launch of We Tell Stories - an exercise in digital writing that we’ve created in partnership with Penguin Books.

We Tell Stories is Six to Start’s first public project, and it’s something we’re incredibly proud of - we’re also glad to be working with Penguin on this project, who’ve been incredibly helpful and about as good a partner as you could expect - Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher at Penguin jumped into the project with great gusto, and talked a little about the reasons why the project’s interesting to Penguin at a panel at SXSW - you can find notes at Clickable Culture and at New Media Buzz.

We’re producing six stories in total, and releasing one a week - this week’s is The 21 Steps, a thriller written by Charles Cumming and set in Google Maps, and each story will have a different method of presentation.

There’s also a prize draw this week in which you can win signed copies of Charles Cumming’s latest books - just visit http://www.wetellstories.co.uk/prizedraw to enter.

If you see a rabbit somewhere on our website, who knows where it might take you…

Here’s some coverage around the web that we’ll be keeping up to date:

• Gamasutra: Q&A: Perplex City Creators Craft ‘We Tell Stories’
• PSFK: We Tell Stories - Literature Meets Gaming
• Jeremy on the Penguin Blog trailing the project: Stories and Games

Here’s the press release in full:

Penguin UK is today launching its most ambitious digital writing project to date. In collaboration with fêted alternate reality game designers Six to Start Penguin has challenged some of its top authors to create new forms of story – designed specially for the internet.

Over six weeks writers including Booker-shortlisted Mohsin Hamid, popular teen fiction author Kevin Brooks, prize-winning Naomi Alderman and bestselling thriller author Nicci French will be pushing the envelope and creating tales that take full advantage of the immediacy, connectivity and interactivity that is now possible. These stories could not have been written 200, 20 or even 2 years ago. We Tell Stories begins with Charles Cumming’s Google Maps adventure. ‘He was the wrong man, in the wrong place, at the wrong time’. Now you can follow his adventures across the nation and across the world, step by step.

But somewhere on the internet is a seventh story, a mysterious tale involving a vaguely familiar girl called Alice. Readers who follow this story will discover clues that will shape Alice’s journey and help her on her way. These clues will appear online and in the real world and will drive readers to the other six stories where they will have the chance to win some wonderful prizes, including The Penguin Complete Classics Library, over £13,000 worth of the greatest books ever written.

Expectation is already high – the gaming community has been awaiting the first project from SixtoStart and the next digital publishing initiative from Penguin whose last project, the wikinovel (http://amillionpenguins.com) generated 85,000 unique visitors in five weeks, arriving at a rate of 10 per second at one point. We Tell Stories will be widely promoted, through traditional and new media channels and will be a significant event in publishing, gaming and new media communities.

We Tell Stories will create new fiction and offer a unique, immersive and innovative experience to readers everywhere.

For more information contact Jeremy Ettinghausen at Penguin Books or Adrian Hon at SixtoStart

Beautiful Katamari for the 360 arrived yesterday in advance of its street date. There are some irritating niggles: there’s no autosave after every level, and for a console that’s got (for most people) a spanking hard drive attached to it, it really does take a while to save and load games. A surprisingly long time, in fact: one that makes you feel as if the game’s crashed.

On the other hand, with a big enough screen, and sitting close enough to it (read: too close), it’s possible to get very quickly seasick and headachey, which is the main impression I walked (nay, stumbled) away with after about half an hour’s worth of play. Everyone else managed to have more fun with it, though, but we were disappointed that there didn’t appear to be a quickstart for split-screen co-op/versus play.

Oh well. Time to find a chipped PS2…

We’re quite serious about games at Six to Start: where serious means hiring out a room with a ten foot screen at BAFTA for our employees and close friends, THX certified sound and nice comfy chairs. And drinks.

Look, see how serious Mink is about playing Guitar Hero. That’s how serious we take games. So seriously we set about playing them with grim determination, and a fanatical devotion to rhythm games.

The evening was only marred by a complete lack of foresight on my part by grabbing We Love Katamari for the PS2 and forgetting to check whether the disc was in the box. Good one.

Anyway, at 4:30pm on a Wednesday, we’re struggling in the office with the decision as to whether or not to (finally) buy a PS3 and working out the logistics of importing Rock Band from the US.