Power to the Pixel

Having been invited to enter something for Power to the Pixel’s Pixel Pitch competition, we found ourselves shortlisted in the final. Our Dark Forest Project went up against a series of ARGs (Alternate Reality Games) all coming out of video projects.

The pitch had at least two USPs in this company:
Firstly, it is primarily a game developed alongside a documentary and larger interactive project. The concept is a game  in the attention it demands from its audience/players and in its revenue model.

Secondly, its video component is documentary rather than drama.

The Dark Forest Game is for the mobile, environmentally-conscious generation.  A game of forest management and exploration using live data from different iconic forests.

Our Brazilian partner Marcelo Godoy (from the Brazilian production company newTV and Mobilefest) couldn’t leave San Paulo at the last minute, but Rachel Jacobs and Toby Barnes led our pitch confidently leaving the panel to pose quite different questions than they had posed of the other six pitches.

We were pleased that the reaction to Dark Forest was one of very positive surprise and highly encouraging curiosity. Karol Martesko from Babelgum was very enthusiaistic and gave us a lot of time, thought and suggestions in a follow-up meeting. So did Ray Maguire from Sony Games, who as a bye-product got several of us addicted to Farmville. We also had a great meeting with Ben Grass of Pure Grass , who had given a clear, clever presentation at the previous day’s conference was equally smart in his advice to us.

For it’s first outing in this arena the Dark Forest game and documentary showed it has legs (or roots) as a cross platform concept, that could be released on the web as a series of short documentary films, linking directly into a larger interactive web campaign and a robust game downloadable to PC, MAC and smart phones.  More work needs to be done on developing this overall concept and the game play itself – which has been fuelled by the useful and interesting discussions with the panel of Pixel Pitch – a great opportunity to work up a new project for our portfolio. The Dark Forest project is developed in association with Active Ingredient.