Melt Awardees
Call Of The Wild
Alex Amsel & Andrew Crawshaw, Tuna Technologies
Tuna Technonolgies are researching and developing a totally microphone-controlled videogame that lets players evoke emotional responses and bizarre behaviour from peculiar creatures by making animal calls into a microphone.
If you ‘talk’ to the creatures in the them in the right way, will respond to your calls. You can make them happy, sad, angry, and even romantic if you know how. As well as being a ‘performance’ game where the gamer has to become more physically involved in the game than usual (to the amusement of any onlookers), we hope the gamer will be convinced that they are eliciting emotional response from the animals. I can believe it’s possible because I managed to become completely immersed in their demo video.
Call of the Wild is based on an idea that Tuna tucked away years ago and which they initially though would be too risky and too ‘wacky’ for games publishers to contemplate, but there has been a huge shift in the games industry and it is now more ready to embrace new styles of gameplay and is keen to find games with mass appeal to gamers and non-gamers alike.
The Melt award is helping Tunatech to create a working prototype which will demonstrate the compelling nature of the gameplay and the sound controlled functionality.
Photograph by Shaun Bloodworth