Interview: Virtual Crime Meets Real World In Life Is Crime - Excerpt from Gamasutra - News

Mobile gaming start-up Red Robot Labs believes that the potential for location-based play can go much further than the check-in, and some big backers support its ideas. The studio just raised $8.5 million for its first game, Android-based Life is Crime -- and Red Robot's founders have more plans.

"We felt that creatively, location was really interesting and hadn't been cracked yet," co-founder Mike Ouye tells Gamasutra.

Like a mix of Mafia Wars and FourSquare, the game sees players committing virtual crimes at real-life locations, such as selling contraband and fighting other players to own a particular location.

And the company believes the time is right to "crack" location-based gameplay, now that check-ins are an increasingly common part of social media, not just with popular tools like FourSquare, which has around 10 million users, but as a feature of Facebook too, to name just the obvious example.

"The marketshare is growing every day, and it felt like people knew how to check in, so let's give them a real game rather than just a bunch of leaderboards," Ouye said, of the theory that led to Red Robot's founding.

Part of evolving the check-in behavior to an actual game involves lessons from the AAA space, says co-founder Pete Hawley, who's worked with Sony, Lionhead and Criterion, to name a few. "I've been making console games for 15 years," he says.

via gamasutra.com

Posted via email from Siobhan O'Flynn's 1001 Tales