six to start

We’ve had some fantastic coverage for the work we’re doing with Penguin Books for We Tell Stories. Here’s a quick, brief roundup of some blog entries and articles from everything that’s out there that have caught our eye:

Contagious Magazine - Penguin Tells Stories

Another week, another cool ARG-type story to report on, this latest from perma-cool publishing house Penguin.

The company has teamed up with Six To Start, newly formed by the creators of ongoing ARG Perplex City Dan and Adrian Hon, to launch a project that encourages six top authors to explore how the interactivity, connectivity and immediacy of the internet can enhance and evolve storytelling. Readers who can answer six questions about the stories are in with a shout of winning themselves the entire library of Penguin Classics – that’s 1300 titles (or 25 feet of shelf-space). [more]

Wired - Perplex City Creators Spin New Thriller

Alternate reality game-maker Six to Start, whose co-founders helped create the popular ARG Perplex City, has a new project that’s just as mysterious: The 21 Steps, a thriller that uses Google Maps, of all things, as its storytelling medium.

The 21 Steps tells the story of Rick, a man with a checkered past who finds himself mixed up with a dangerous organization that wants him to smuggle a mysterious vial into Scotland. A blue line traces Rick’s path across satellite images from Google Maps as you work your way through the story by clicking on location markers. [more]

Google Lat-Long Blog - How do you read a map?

Well, on a new Penguin Publishing site, you read it like a book. The text of select stories is literally displayed on maps. The site promises “Six authors. Six stories. Six weeks.” The first is a short story by Charles Cumming entitled “21 Steps,” inspired by the John Buchan novel The 39 Steps. And you can read chapters, snippets, and dialogue on a map of London. The interactive map guides you through the protagonist’s travels, revealing the next chapter of the story as you–and she–reach the destination. Visualizing the connection of the story to its physical setting expands the reader’s perspective and makes the story more palpably real. [more]

News.com - Interactive game mixes classic novels with Web 2.0 mashups

The alternate-reality game genre has a new friend, and a new format, thanks to Penguin Books, the famous British publishing house.

On Tuesday, Penguin and startup Six to Start launched their new ARG, We Tell Stories, a new-style game that its creators say is a hybrid of traditional story-telling, Web 2.0-style mashups, interactive games and classic novels. [more]

USA Today - Tell me a different story

What happens when you mix classic literature, modern writers and alternate reality games? You get We Tell Stories by venerable publisher Penguin. The site mashes up all those ingredients for a six-week experiment in digital fiction. Game designers Six to Start and six top authors re-tell six classic stories over the course of six weeks with one goal: to blend the ‘immediacy, connectivity and interactivity’ of the Net into a new form of storytelling. As the site says, ‘These stories could not have been written 200, 20 or even 2 years ago.’

[more]

Gamasutra - Q&A: Perplex City Creators Craft ‘We Tell Stories’

The milieu of digital games has been significantly extended by the Alternate Reality Game, which was pioneered by titles such as Majestic and The Beast, and uses puzzles and clues hidden in webpages and even real-life to entice readers.

UK ARG startup Six To Start, founded by Dan and Adrian Hon - previously at Mind Candy, where they developed the collectible card-based Perplex City, described as “the world’s first commercially successful ARG” - is now embarking on its first projects as a new company.

[more]

We’re always on the lookout for interesting clients to work with. Do you have a story to tell? Let us know.

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

We’re really excited about a project we’ve been working on for the last couple of months with Jeremy Ettinghausen and Sam Binnie over at Penguin.

Story, alongside gameplay, is at the heart of what we do, which is why teaming up with a publisher with such rich history and commitment to storytelling has been a great opportunity for us, and an opportunity to do something a little different from what we normally do. We’re conscious that the only prior example of our work has been Perplex City, which is markedly different from the projects we’re working on now.

While Perplex City was very game and puzzle heavy - or at least games and puzzles had equal weight to the story we produced, our work with Penguin is all about telling a great story and exploring new ways of telling those stories, ways that wouldn’t be possible without the internet. This doesn’t mean there’s going to be no gameplay in the Pengrin project…

There’s not a lot more that we can say at the moment, apart from give you a glimpse of part of our planning process:

We’re launching in March, so if you’d like to know when everything goes live, please sign up.

Update: Some people think we’re working with Eric Harshbarger on this project. Sorry, but we’re not. Eric’s fantastic and while we thoroughly enjoyed working with him at Mind Candy, we’re not currently working with him on anything. We do look forward to having the chance to work with him in the future, though (Hi, Eric!).