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HANGOVER BLASTER Winner of Funnymoney's viral marketing game of the year |
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A year in review by Graham Chipsticks. The marketing director of RoncoWeb and senior consultant on BBC TV's "Attachments: Moving On" explains how he kept the company's profile high in 2001 |
| January - 2001: A "Cyber-Space" Odyssey! |
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Doesn't everyone get a little too drunk, at new years! Have you ever noticed that? Isn't it so true? It was with this witty little observation of ours in mind that January 2001 saw the launch of our infamous 'Hangover Blaster' game in which you must shoot everything - alarm clocks, babies, Teletubbies! (People just love spotting contemporary references) that make your headache worse. A little sick, I know, but so funny and in so many ways! The graphics were amazing (Thanks Stewart), Dominic was getting really good at flash programming and that month alone, we estimate that we had at least 10,000 hits to our 'Hangover Blaster' website which is a great advertisment for ourselves because it said "More fun from the Roncoweb nutcases!" on the loading screen, on a banner ad, on a poster in the game bedroom and when you won it, you were taken to our website in ten different pop up windows and your printer printed out a form to buy banner advertising space on our site. Having seen the success of the game, a Kent plastic box manufacturor even paid to re-use it on their website and reported some users staying on their site for as long as two minutes as a result! |
| February - Foot and Mouth |
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The mega*hysteria* surrounding our beloved hangover game was wearing down,
and so we felt it time to make a new game.
Since in February, you couldn't escape from foot and mouth stories,
we decided a bit of satire was called for and so "Foot and Mouth Crisis" was born.
I'm sure you got it in your email inbox about ten times from people who thought it was the funniest, but if you didn't - the rules were simple: Shoot the infected cows that put their feet in their mouths and avoid the healthy ones with their feet on the ground! It was brilliant genius! 50,000 hits this month - not bad, and a call from a crisp manufacturor who thought that a Panda on Panda Beat-em-Up set in a crisp factory will really help generate e-business. I successfully convinced him that it would. |
| March - Celebrity Big Brother |
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It was the show everyone was talking about and since, as
the pop band Slipknot would later obseverve
"people=hits", it was time for another game. Initial thinking was for a 'little computer people' type game where you can tell the contestants what to do - but, alas, we only had a week in which to programme. Therefor, it was eventually decided that you play Big Brother's hovering laser eye and you must zap Jack Dee everytime he tries to escape like a mad man! Celebrity Big Brother was done for Comic Relief but ours was better as it was done for free. Despite completing within schedule, we only ended up with 300 hits. Apparently, some kid made an animation about it on his site which was really popular but I saw it, the graphics were terrible and the humour didn't even make any sense - Vanessa singing and dancing along to some odd Japanese pop song whilst dressed as an angel. Where's the humour without a game? Anyway, the joke's on him as he didn't make any money out of it at all! Not even a banner ad. |
| April - April Fool! |
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For April, we thought of April Fools day and so we made a brilliant hoax email virus warning.
It told how a 'Girlfriend' foreward slash 'Boyfriend' virus is going around, and went on to make observations about how men and women view relationships so differently. What was so clever about it, anyway, was that it was written in the style of an email virus warning, and ended on a link to our website! We assume it was forwarded to everyone since it was so funny, but not too funny that some people don't get the joke. You have to be aware of the mass market, and treat people as you would treat the stupidest - that way, everyone gets it. |
| May - Mobile Phones in the UK |
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Have you noticed how many people have mobile phones nowadays? I was looking in the local school gates and I noticed that almost all the kids have one. Even the police had walkie-talkies, which are a similar thing. Realising that a bit of a trend was developing here and wherever there's a trend, there's people, I thought - how about a game in which you throw land phones at people on mobile phones. That would be absolutely hilarious! (if a little sick). I went off and registered the domain www.mobilephonephonephone.org, whilst Stewart started drawing the sort of people who'd use a phone - the Yuppie on a Skateboard! The Punk with spiky green hair! The businessman in a suit! The kid with the cap on back to front! Three weeks later, we launched the game. People thought it was hilarious. .Net magazine made it 7th best game on the internet about phones, and I got an interview with Graphical Developer in which I managed to plug for 70% of the interview and get away with it. The Roncoweb name's really getting about now - it can only be so long until the clients start following. |
| June - Summer Girls |
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To celebrate seeing the sunbathing girls outside whilst we
worked round the clock catching up on client work which we missed
to make last month's game, we had a great idea for a game, which
could only attract visitors to our site. Stewart would attach a web cam to his body, and using the latest technology, would walk around the park, and users could log on and press the controls 'left', 'right', 'forward' and 'wink' whilst looking at the girls! However, Stewart said he didn't want to do this because gingers blister easily, and so we had to make a girl watching SIMULATOR whereby you have to fire kisses at girls and avoid the men! 20,000 hits - yes! And thanks to a link from seethru.co.uk - 20,500 hits - woo hoo! Whilst most of these hits were from teenagers, it doesn't matter because those hits will one day grow up into potential sales. |
| July - Disaster |
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It was in this month that we lost the deal with a big car
company to do some advertising. We had it all planned - posters and banner ads of "Who owns this new car?" were going to be everywhere and then two months later, we'd have revealed that it's a giant baby's head driving the car. Who'd have thought it? Following the car deal failure, one of our backers pulled out and the company was frozen. Stewart got a job in his dad's car showroom, Dominic died, and I signed on. Rival software house Tim Bregade made a game whereby you must steal business from troubled companies. Only it wasn't done in flash, it was done in real life. You just don't joke about things like that. No exclamation marks. |
| August - Mend these broken wings |
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Having only just seen our Hangover Blaster game,
the director of a local coach company thought that they could
lure people into travelling with them by putting a game on their
website whereby you can't be shown the travelling times at all
until you have completed all ten levels of increasing difficulty. It was a brilliant and funny game because it was in 3D. It was also costly enough to put us back in business. |
| September - Bin Laden |
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The month was dominated by one thing - September 7th. Bin Laden was a new figure of hate - the Hitler for the nineties. But we had to be quick, and our shoot Bin Laden game was ready to such a state that as soon as they announced it was him that did it, it would only take 20 seconds to update the graphics with his face and fire off. However, it was a bit too rushed, and once you got to level three, Bin Laden's face reverted to that of Phil Mitchell and the American backdrop, Albert Square. Nevertheless, 5 billion hits. A fortune in bandwidth. And a deal to make a website for a pet cemetary specialising in insects as a direct lead from their chairman who played it. However, since websites are so passe and we think outside of the box, we convinced them to have an e-mail game instead. |
| October - Bin Laden |
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Stewart managed to make a photoshop plug-in which allowed you to open
any picture and it will add Bin Laden's face,
and our website address at the touch of a button. As you can image-ine, we had great fun with this - Bin Laden being gay (with a surprisingly attractive man, due to the fact we had to download some gay porn to make it)! Bin Laden on the toilet!, Bin Laden in the IRA!, Bin Laden on the faces of the Bassment Jaxx (we know who they are, so it would make our company look well cool!), Bin Laden facing the wrong way on his own body! We emailed this to all the people we know and it generally went down hilariously! However, the gay one lost us custom when one of our clients complained that it is homophobic, and besides, any religious fundamentalist is actually going to be against homosexuality and -especially with his body colour not matching - it doesn't even make any sense. Like, doesn't he understand irony? We were being ironic. Still, these lampoon pics kept our company in high profile, and we got 40,000 hits - with 1% even looking at as many as 2 pages of our site. |
| November - Bin Laden |
| Good news - Bin Laden's face is still really funny. Despite being inundated with client work to get the exact RGB colour on their logo or lose them potential business because people might not know it's them if the hue is wrong, we still managed to get out a slidey-block puzzle of his face to let the potential clients know that we're still thinking of them and we're still thinking of them having fun with us. It is important not to become invisible. People are stupid and forgetful and one web year is equal to 13 earth months. |
| December - Harry Potter |
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The kids love Harry Potter, don't they? I thought about a game based on it, but then I thought I'd write a kid's book myself - try and cash in on the whole reading thing. It's about a child who gets trapped inside the internet when his house is struck by lightening. He has a lot of fun and adventure on our website with his mute dog called Growler (get it!!). It should do very well indeed. It's got a forward by Scat D. It was also this month that we won Funnymoney's viral marketing game of the year for 'Hangover Blaster'. Aparently we'd given them 5,000 more links to their site with their banner exchange programme than the nearest rival 'Shooting for Election' and as a result have our site listed on page 18 of their site, and a giant award banner linking to them to put on every page of our site. |
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Till next year, Graphically slick and simple to understand, Graham 'Graham' Chipsticks content by www.monkeon.co.uk |