Crazy Boat and the Curse of the Trash Vortex (2011)

It is the near future and the Pacific Trash Vortex has reached critical mass, flooding nearby seas with strange and valuable debris.  A new age of sea entrepreneurship has arisen. Take your rusty rig and explore a changed Pacific Ocean…

IO9: “The Best Sci-Fi Distraction on Facebook”

NY Times Magazine: “Enormously Compelling”

Forbes: “Weird, witty and compelling”

We called upon some of the greatest mid-century American action serials to make a game that both harkens back to the adventures of yore and puts a new face on the idea of exploration, with an emphasis on the environmental impact of what reckless exploration means to the planet at large. 5% of our in-game revenues go to benefit Project Kaisei, a non-profit dedicated to cleaning up the real Pacific Trash Vortex.

Crazy Boat contains many gameplay innovations. The biggest: it uses Facebook profile data to give players in-game bonuses for their real-world skills and strengths. If you you post messages about the forest to your facebook wall, you might earn the Forest Ranger skill, and if you post about current events, you might score points as a Politician. In addition, in a first for Facebook games, players share their adventures with groups of up to four – and what happens to one affects all four.

I worked on the game with many talented people, including the consummate artist Joe Alterio, front-end guru David Kurtz, and crack iPhone developer Tom Brow.