6 stonking finger-twiddlers fresh from our “Addictive Games” program
Thursday, May 27th, 2010Alcohol. Education. Pet care. Not the typical digital menage-a-trois, but Thought Den don’t do route one (unless we have our serious hat on and our client has their serious face on) Believe it or not these three seemingly unrelated industries have become important strings to our viral bow. Over the last few years we’ve produced a tonne of games for the big boys, mostly through Team Rubber, but we’ve struggled to persuade Kerve’s client Southern Comfort to join the party. Our Pet Factor videos for the National Office of Animal Health went down well but we’ve still not done a game for them. And then the penny dropped. Games are unrivalled for in-depth brand engagement when you get the hard bits right – playability, entertainment, messaging. See the success of the Sherlock Holmes and Star Trek ARGs. So along came two great briefs from Kerve resulting in 6 stonking, time-frazzling, finger-jiggling, play-monsters.


Whet your whistle with some southern Comfort Swamp Drifting (don’t drink and drift…) in this game in support of Southern Comfort’s sponsorship of the True Blood TV series on FX. Once you’ve collected HM Heron’s precious cargo from the ‘gator infested Bayou (linky-link to Swamp Drifter), pop into New Orleans for a bit of Vamp-dodging. This second game for the True Blood series of digital treats takes inspiration from Jewel Thief, a skanky, pixel-tastic, PC-based game of childhood yore. Collect the gems. Don’t get caught. Here’s the link – Vampire Chase.


Cute-animal alert! Ask yourself this – should rabbits eat broccoli? Not according to the law of Cybervores! This little digi-toy combines a cracking little suite of mini-games for kiddie-winks, crafted over almost 6 weeks of game-testing and development at the Den.

It’s a bit like tamagotchi, but we got rid if the boring click-to-cuddle / click-to-feed and focused on gameplay / gameplay with classics like as Catch, Hide and Seek, Sports Day and Pairs. Have a quick play, they’re all under 2 minute interactions, and let us know what you think. And damn, the illustrations are good.


Many thanks to all the good people who have contributed – our main man on the visual side Mr Ben Webb; all the cool dudes at Communicator in London; Dom, Ben and Dave at Kerve for joyous XML wrangling and file uploading.



