The Route to Zombies, Run!
Zombies, Run! is an augmented audio* running game for the iPhone and iPod Touch. You put your trainers on, your headphones in, and when you start running, you hear the game and story all round you, coming straight to your ears. It’s a game for everyone who loves or wants to love running, jogging, and walking. We’ve written a lot about Zombies, Run! on our Kickstarter page and official website, so in this blog we want to talk about how this game became about and why we’re making it. *We just made that term up. The Dream: An...
read moreThe Code: What’s New?
In just a few weeks, we’ll be launching an ambitious new project with the BBC called The Code. The Code is a 3-part TV show presented by Prof. Marcus du Sautoy about how we can explain the world through numbers, shapes and equations – but it’s also a next-generation treasure hunt with a very real and very cool treasure. It’s not as if The Code is the first TV show to innovate online; The Million Pound Drop, Misfits, Virtual Revolution, Push Nevada, and more have all done very cool things mixing the web and TV. But what...
read moreTransmedia Storytelling podcast
We’re great admirers of the BBC’s College of Production which provides really high quality teaching resources about TV, radio, and online production for free, so it was a pleasure to be invited on to their podcast to talk about transmedia storytelling. It’s a 21 minute podcast and the guests included Chris Sizemore, Executive Editor of BBC’s Learning & Knowledge Online, and Meg Jayanth, a BBC multiplatform producer (and former Six to Start intern!). You can listen to (or download) the podcast from the site, and...
read moreCreating Four Codes and Keys
Last month we finished a really fun and energetic puzzle hunt we made for Death Cab for Cutie called Four Codes and Keys. We’re big fans of DCFC at Six to Start, so it was a pleasure to work with them, along with Atlantic Records and eBay on this – in the space of just a few weeks we created four unique games that used Twitter, Foursquare, our Wanderlust platform, and photos in new ways. But of course, it’s not really the tech that’s important, it’s the experience, so do check out the games and read our brief case...
read morePutting the ‘Game’ back in ARGs
At this year’s SXSW conference, I gave a solo session about putting the ‘game’ back in ARGs. The talk was basically a very frank look at the state of Alternate Reality Games now, where they sit on the hype curve (spoiler: right at the nadir), why they’ve failed to live up to our expectations, and what they need to do to become more popular and successful. The session itself wasn’t recorded, but I’ve done a screencast of the talk which you can watch below: As an ‘Intermediate’ level talk, it...
read moreIntroducing Wanderlust
Everyone loves location-based stuff. Ever since smartphones with GPS chips became cheap and usable, we’ve seen an explosion of apps, services, and games that seek to bring the digital world into the real world. Some have been hits, like Foursquare and SCVNGR, but others – like real-time games – are taking more time to mature. Naturally, we’ve long wondered how best to make location-based stories. Of course, the idea of readers having to move in the real world to advance in a story is nothing new. But they haven’t...
read moreThe Code: Coming Soon
We’re making a next-generation treasure hunt for the BBC, The Code… If you’ve followed Six to Start for a while, you’ll know that we have a thing for treasure hunts, whether that’s a bibliophile’s dream prize of 1000 books in We Tell Stories, or our worldwide hunt for the launch of Muse’s album The Resistance. And of course, before Six to Start, I was the lead designer of Perplex City, an 18-month long epic alternate reality game with a £100,000 prize. Treasure hunts have a special kind of romance...
read moreIntroducing the Six to Start Associates
One of the best things about Six to Start are the people we get to work with, from our full-time staff to the talented freelance creatives who join us for specific projects. We think we can make pretty good games, but we also know that if you want to make the very best, you need to get the very best involved. So, over the years we’ve built up strong relationships with a range of freelancers we’ve worked with, or whose work we’ve admired. And now we’re proud to announce the first Six to Start Associates –...
read moreFinal Final Fantasy
Final Fantasy is the epitome of everything that is good and bad about games that try to tell a memorable story. While it’s easy to mock the tedious predictability of the series and its imitators, it’s the only game with a story that my friends at school talked about, and the only one where numerous boys freely confessed that they cried at Aeris’ death in Final Fantasy VII. This is quite the achievement, since it was in a school and at a time when people would use any excuse to call each other ‘gay’. Because I...
read moreEnigma Phone Line: An old favourite
When we produced the Enigma Challenge for Wired UK, we had a lot of fun creating varied tasks and puzzles for our players to tackle – from online flashmobs to collaborative photo montages, by way of Victorian trivia and obscure visual codes. But six months down the line, there’s one that’s really stuck with us above them all and we’d like to bring it to your attention. It starts with some strange symbols around the edges of a double page spread about Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Alien Glyphs? Messages to agents in the field? No. But...
read more