UK studio is preparing to release its first iPhone music game, armed with major label tracks

UK startup 8linQ is hoping to spearhead a new wave of music games for smartphones and tablets, with its first game Say What?! due to be released on 20 July for iPhone armed with a licensing deal with major label Sony Music Entertainment.

The company is a joint venture between three partners: Music In Colour, Reactify and Metropolis Group. The first of those is a music production company formed by former staff from FreestyleGames, which developed the DJ Hero console games, while the latter is one of the most prestigious recording studios in the world.

Based at the studio complex in London, 8linQ has been working on Say What?! for several months, culminating in its launch next week with playable tracks from artists including Calvin Harris, Scouting for Girls, the Zutons and The Nolans.

“The music business needs to capture a new audience,” says joint managing director Chris Lee. “Rather than make a game then license the music, this is much more of a partnership. We think there is a great opportunity to leverage the mobile platform to build something that reaches a wider audience, and monetises music.”

Say What?! takes a different approach to DJ Hero and other console music games like Guitar Hero. Lee says that 8linQ’s key aim was to avoid any assumption that the game’s players will be experienced gamers.

The game uses a scrolling collection of icons, which relate to individual highlighted words within the lyrics to the current song, which are displayed above. If the word ‘I’ is highlighted, the player might have to tap on an eye icon, for example, while ‘down’ might be the cue to tap on a downward-facing arrow.

At higher difficulty levels, the clues get more cryptic. “There will be puns left, right and centre that take you a good five seconds to crack what the icon is representing,” explains Yuli Levtov, the game’s designer, and founder of the third partner in the joint venture: generative music studio Reactify Music.

“It’s almost a Generation Game mechanic: a simple layer that lives over the music,” says Lee. “We’re not trying to be cleverer than that. This is about something that appeals in its simplicity, and we’re trying not to niche it. It should appeal as much to 8-13 year-old girls as it does to 30-40 year-old males.”

Lee adds that Say What?! was inspired by iOS games like Cut the Rope and Trainyard. “They’re cute, you’re allowed to fail and it doesn’t matter,” he says. “Far too many games can fall into the trap of having a game mechanic based on failure, and the fear of failure driving you to do stuff. We don’t think that’s what the mobile audience wants.”

Say What?! will be free to download with four included tracks: one from a big Sony Music artist, and three from emerging acts signed to Music In Colour. Tracks from Sony – and ultimately other labels too – will be sold via in-app payments of £1.19 per song.

It’s the second example this month of a major label selling music within this kind of game, following EMI’s deal with Facebook games publisher MXP4. Downloads within Say What will be chart-eligible too.

“It will be a great story if you can take a catalogue title – a single that was released 20 or 30 years ago – and see it get into the top 10 with 100,000 downloads because it’s in a game,” says Ian Brenchley, joint managing director of 8linQ and managing director at Metropolis Group. “This is the merging of music and software in a really nice evolutionary form, that monetises music in a different way.”

Lee says that making games for iOS has been a fresh challenge for the team members who cut their teeth on DJ Hero and other console games.

“I love the immediacy of being able to create content,” he says. “Development cycles are so much shorter, and you get that immediacy of feedback too, where you can watch how your consumer is playing, react and develop new features. We have designed this game so that if we get a song at 9am, we can have it for sale by 9am the next day.”

Say What?! will also be the first game to be promoted using the Future Games Network, a service that is being launched by another UK developer, Future Games of London. The idea behind the network is to promote other developers’ iOS games to FGOL’s existing community of 18 million players.

It’s a good example of the promotional networks that are springing up around apps and games, just as 8linQ is an example of the kind of partnerships that are emerging as companies from different creative industries target the apps market.

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Stuart Dredge

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Technology Guardian’s Dr Aleks Krotoski turns TV presenter tomorrow night for a new BBC series that examines the impact of the world wide web

You may have noticed the absence from these parts – particularly on the Games blog – of our colleague Aleks Krotoski in recent months. That’s because she’s been busy travelling the world for a new BBC series about the history of the world wide web – and finishing her PhD, of course.

The first part of the fruits of her labours, The Virtual Revolution, airs Saturday at 8.30pm on BBC2. Travelling with a team of BBC documentary makers, and accompanied on part of the journey by web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Aleks journeys across four continents and six countries and speaks to more than 50 people who have made the web what it is today – including some rather famous names, such as Bill Gates, Al Gore, Stephen Fry, Jimmy Wales, Arianna Huffington, Mark Zuckerberg, Chad Hurley, Stewart Brand, Jeff Bezos … and the President of Estonia.

For Dr Aleks (as she now insists we call her), the making of the series was a very personal journey: “It was an amazing opportunity to meet the people who have helped to create exactly the things I’ve been writing about and studying for the past decade,” she says. “I managed to meet most of the people I referenced in my PhD thesis, and was able to ask them all of the difficult questions I had been thinking about in my research.

“It really was an extraordinary adventure that allowed me to test a few theories, challenge some of my long-held ideas and to dream up a few more along the way.”

You can find out more about The Virtual Revolution at this article by Dr Aleks in the Observer, or by listening to the Tech Weekly podcast.

And after watching the first episode on Saturday night, please pop back here and give us your thoughts in the comments …

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Stuart O’Connor

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