Romeo becomes an online viral game winner for Koko Digital
Oct 27 2009 by Anna Blackaby, Birmingham Post
It’s a Midland match made in digital heaven.
A Staffordshire-made viral computer game featuring a miniature Romeo’s adventures in historic Warwickshire has attracted over 16 million plays around the world, helping thousands of potential tourists fall in love with the region’s charms online.
Koko Digital, which specialises in making addictive “advergames” promoting products or brands online, created the game for Warwickshire tourism body Shakespeare Country.
The “Romeo, wherefore art thou?” game has attracted so much viral publicity, spreading from person to person around the internet, that it has been played 16.1 million times since the start of June, translating into around 45,000 plays a day.
To top it off, Koko Digital has picked up an industry award in the Best Online game category in this year’s Roses Design Awards and is up for a clutch of other prestigious prizes.
Shakespeare Country chief executive Phil Hackett said the game had been successful in driving potential tourists from all over the world to the organisation’s website. “It has gone from 40 or 50,000 to half a million a month – it’s massive,” he said.
Such has been the success of the game that a new project is in the pipeline for the whole Heart of England tourism board area. “We will definitely do it again and we need to have a think about the next innovative thing we can come up with,” he said.
Koko Digital is also celebrating a new contract to produce an online game for Sony Music to promote Chris Moyles’s new album.
The company, which employs eight people at its Keele University Science and Business Park base, will create the game to publicise the Radio One DJ’s The Parody Album, due to hit the shops on November 23. The Parody Island game, which will see the DJ starring as the main character, will be released in early-November.
Chris Steele, who cofounded Koko in 2007 alongside Karl Bloor and Stu Howarth, said the firm had seen a big increase in the number of new business wins in the last few weeks as tentative signs of improvement in the wider economy meant that marketing budgets were brought back to life.
“We go to a lot of the exhibitions and last September we started to get a lot of enquiries from people who were looking at different ways they could spend their marketing budget but none of them from people who were signing up,” he said. “Now, the enquiries that we had months ago are all getting in touch. We are already considering moving to a bigger space.”
Play the Romeo game at www.shakespearegame.com
