Our licensed game Tringo received a prominent mention in this week's great Business Week cover story about our friends at the virtual world Second Life.
Excerpt: It's time to try Second Life's most popular game. Tringo is a combination of bingo and the puzzle-like PC game Tetris,
where you quickly try to fit various shapes that appear on a screen
into squares, leaving as few empty squares as you can.. Instead, I seek out Tringo's
creator, Nathan Keir, a 31-year-old programmer in Australia whose
avatar is a green-and-purple gecko, "Kermitt Quirk." It turns out
Keir's game is so popular, with 226 selling so far at 15,000 Lindens a
pop, or about $50, that a real-world company called Donnerwood Media
ponied up a licensing fee in the low five figures, plus royalties. Tringo soon will grace Nintendo Co.'s (NTDOY
) Game Boy Advance and cell phones. "I never expected it at all," Keir
tells me, his awe evident even in a text chat clear across the world.
He's working on new games now, wondering if he can carve out a living.
That would be even cooler than the main benefit so far: making his mum
proud
We've talked about our upcoming Nintendo GBA game, which lands in stores on April 25th, but we have also licensed Tringo to a public UK media company called YooMedia, which will be producing a multiplayer ITV version of Tringo in Europe. A nice article about the great potential of that deal is here from the UK Sunday Times Online, towards the end of the article.
Next steps are to finish off the PC and mobile discussions we started a few months ago, as well as to nail down an ITV deal for the US. Tringo is ready-made for these platforms, with a simplicity and addictive quality rarely seen in most games, so I'm excited to see it finally ship. Plus we'll have Tringo merchandise available for your Meez next week after our next release, so come back on Wednesday.
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