Introducing 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 moreOpen Web Gaming: Mozilla & Six to Start
We’ve teamed up with Mozilla Labs to hold an Open Web Gaming event on Monday 6th December in London. ‘Open Web Gaming’ is simple – it’s means games that are developed and played using open technologies like HTML and Javascript. We’ve lined up a fantastic range of developers who’ll be showing off working game demos and talking about interesting solutions in a series of 10-minute lightning talks (and if you’d like to speak, or show off your game, get in touch at hello [at] sixtostart.com!) The...
read moreSix to Start in Develop Magazine
This month’s November issue of Develop Magazine has a great editorial by Michael French about the state of the UK’s games industry compared to the rising powerhouse of Canada. After surveying the videogaming territory, French concludes: The exciting UK companies aren’t the 100-man studies pumping out 360 games, it’s nimbler non-traditional outfits. Moshi, Hello Games, Wonderland, Six to Start… Just ask EA: it’s the one that spend $500m in 12 months to buy iPhone and Facebook stars from London and...
read moreAnnouncing the Last Word Challenge
We’re proud to announce that we’ve launched our latest project – The Last Word Challenge. Developed with New Scientist and Profile Books, The Last Word Challenge is the Ultimate Science Quiz, featuring over 100 questions from the popular book series, including all new material from the upcoming “Why Can’t Elephants Jump?”. But this isn’t just a series of fascinating and hilarious quizzes. The Last Word Challenge also features an innovative quiz creator to make the challenge your own. Compiling a quiz from our question...
read moreBe a paid intern at Six to Start!
At Six to Start, we’re worked with a number of interns over the years, and we’ve found it to be a great experience for everyone involved; we’re able to provide interns valuable experience of game development in a real working environment, and for our part, we value the new ideas that interns bring. So we’re very pleased to offer a six-week paid internship, beginning in October. We’re looking for smart people who are interested in making social and story-based online games. You must be able to demonstrate...
read moreComing Soon: Last Word Challenge
We’re very happy and excited to announce that Six to Start is working with New Scientist and Profile Books to create The Last Word Challenge, a social game/quiz that for New Scientist’s forthcoming book, Why Can’t Elephants Jump? There aren’t many science quizzes out there, and even fewer of them are: a) fun b) scientific But by joining forces with Profile Books and New Scientist, we think we can make a game that’s really special – something that’s a lot of fun, that helps you learn some very neat...
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