A game brought to the street

From October 4th, 2007 a real street game, the Monkey Murder Mystery, will start in four Dutch cities. The Monkey Murder Mystery is a local interactive reality game, which gets gamers away from their computer. The gamers will hunt or be hunted, not with a water or paint pistol, but with a camera equipped mobile.

Monkey Murder Mystery will start in four Dutch cities (Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Nijmegen and Groningen) and will last 9 weeks. The participants of the game will compete with each other in order to become the ultimate opponent of Monkey Murder. The eventual winner will receive a sum of 5.000 euro.

The game is a combination of reality and virtuality. The stress is on gaming outside the house away from the computer, hunting for an opponent in the same city and attempting to catch him with a snapshot and sending this shot. During the game the participants will have to fulfil assignments. For every right answer they receive leads, which bring them closer to the person to be excluded. The assignments will get more difficult and vary from finding a location on internet or in the city or solving a riddle. As soon as the participant has collected enough information to identify the target person, the shoot to kill element with the mobile is started. The gamer make a kill, when he/she films or photographs the target person. After nine weeks one person will remain in every city, who will receive 1.000 euro. In the final they will compete with each other. The winner of this final will receive 4.000 euro from Monkey Murder.

The whole game turns around completing assignments on behalf of Monkey Murder. This sly criminal is searching for his ultimate opponent. Monkey Murder has been born on June 17, 1966 in Leiden with the name Wilhelm Adriaan Schrooten. At birth Wilhelm appeared to have a congenial disease in his face, giving him a monkeylike appearance. Monkey gets on the wrong track and has had to fight opponents in his criminal career. In this way he got the name Monkey Murder. He wants to let the world know what he has done and wants to be respected in eternity. This is his reason for looking for a respected opponent. He is looking for the craftful and most skilful player.

The game is produced for Hi, the youth brand for mobile of KPN. LG Mobile is sponsoring the game. The cross medial bureau On conceptualised and produced the game. The participant will on average send 15 MMS and 35 SMS.

The game is not the first outside game in The Netherlands. Probably the crossmedia game Blackbeard Connection was the first one. Recently the mobile game Triangler received much attention.

Blog Posting Number: 869

Tags: games