Red Fighting the Wolves

Yesterday saw a huge flood of online news generated by the posting of an image and a single tweet. The image represented some recent thinking on a game concept being evolved at Spicy Horse – based on “Red Riding Hood”. In my tweet I mentioned the image and the fact I’d be talking about the project with publishers at next week’s GDC event in San Francisco. With a little luck the project will find a publisher and Spicy can start on a 2nd big project (Alice 2 being the first of course).

Here’s a list of links from major sites that carried the news.

GAMEPRO
Game Set Watch
Super Punch
Fear Net
Video Gamer
Play.tm
Kotaku
Strategy Informer
Game Planet
Joystiq
Destructoid
Gay Gamer
Big Download
Platform Nation
Computer and Video Games

No denying: social media is a powerful thing. Here’s a graph depicting traffic driven to my flickr account by the news.

Red Traffic from Social Media

That’s a single day of traffic equivalent to what was generated when we announced the new “Alice” project. Seems the world really loves “Red” – glad to hear it! What I really love is the tremendous power of people to directly support things they like in an immediate and genuine way. Reminds me of the waves of interest Wolfenstien and DOOM created – even before there was traditional marketing behind them. Direct communication with fans and direct sales to consumers drove many successful products back in those days. With the re-emergence of pure digital distribution and social networks (Facebook’s just IRC, twitter’s just .plan files in a shiny new package, right?) developers and publishers have another shot at making games for and with the people that consume them – not just for the sake of giving marketing departments something to justify their existence.

Power to the people 😉