Orange: Balloonacy

A multi-player online game consisting of a "balloon race" between tens of thousands of competitors, taking place across a virtual map overlaid onto thousands of public websites.

I worked closely on the development of the original idea into a practical, deliverable campaign, envisaged the technology approach from the start, and led the development team in building the system.

This was new technical ground in UK agency-land as it involved not only custom game mechanics deployed within ads across multiple trafficking systems, but also direct on media properties, individual users' blogs and websites, and was co-ordinated across all these channels by a dedicated game engine we designed and built specially for the event.

We built the game server using a custom, lightweight PHP MVC/ORM system I wrote, and synchronization & communication with the Flash overlay front-end was done using AMF, with auto-generated data objects. I designed, deployed and managed the hosting and delivery platform.

This was the project I was most proud of at POKE, not only because it won multiple awards at IAB, IMA and LIA for "technological innovation" and "best online game" (amongst others), but mostly because the team I'd hand-built, nurtured and led was firing on all cylinders. We made something genuinely new and exciting, which gave a lot of people a great deal of pleasure.

Press/media coverage in BIMA, D&AD, Creativity Online.