SXSW Bound

On Thursday we take off for SXSW in Austin, TX., where we’ll be launching our big new thing — a product that will allow us to offer something like a DIY version The Go Game!!! An iPhone app version of TGG — it can be played by anyone (for now anyone with an iPhone), anywhere (starting w 10 cities…20 more coming by summer), and it will magically turn any gathering into a Go Game. No Gamerunner needed.
Led by David Moles on the iPhone side and David Yun and Finn on the back end, it’s been a huuuuge and productive effort for the last several months. We’re incredibly excited/proud/tired.
Couple thoughts that led us down this road:
1. The technology is finally here. It really took ios4 for the scale to tip and allow us to deliver something we feel proud of. So much of The Go Game magic relies on the video/music pairing that’s done live and on-the-fly by the gamerunner. Apple’s new operating system allows us to finally do justice to teams’ ‘creative’ missions. Finn enlisted a bunch of friends to create custom soundtracks. We think you’ll agree that the interface is hot.
2. Our content is really good. We’ve been writing and executing these games for 10 years and we’ve learned a lot about what groups like to do, what they can/can’t do, how to pace a game, what confuses them, and what delights them. So we’re putting our game content front and center. People generally have a hard time writing good real-world game/scavenger style missions — and we’re the experts. We do it all for you.
3. The demand is here — knocking on our door, every day. We get thousands of inquiries looking for a Go Game for smaller parties (birthdays, bachleor/ette, anniversaries, team-building, etc) and we can finally service them at a really great price point. The demand has been here for a while, but we never felt solid enough about our HTML version of the ‘everywhere game’ to really go after it, full-throttle. Now — we’re ready!
4. We’re full-trottle. It’s in the App store (releasing soon). We’ve done a ton of design work, made stop-motion movies, have a good PR push coming. It’s exciting!
Much more to come over the next week. I’ll try to post some updates from Austin.
Stay tuned amigos!