We built The Sopranos A&E Connection Game website and game engine with “Big Game” makers area/code. The game ran from December 15th, 2006 through February 2007 in conjunction with A&E’s broadcast of season 1 of The Sopranos. It synced gameplay with live broadcast in a unique gaming experience. Beyond the success of the premiere, the game generated the most traffic in the history of AETV.com at the time that it was active.
When episodes were broadcast on A&E, the players’ online gameboards came to life and animated synchronously to the TV signal. As the characters, settings and objects of the Sopranos appeared onscreen, the corresponding pieces would light up and score points. This simple game interaction, which borrowed from the logic of fantasy sports and applied it to the realm of drama, created a passionate and addicted community and turned each episode into an intense and highly social event.
Minimalist built the backend server and infrastructure for the game, co-managed the data generation process, and integrated the image recognition service for the gamepiece collection.
You can read more about it in this New York Times article linked below. The game server was an ASP.NET application running on Windows Server and SQL Server 2005.
Links
- New York Times – To Get Viewers for Reruns, a ‘Sopranos’ Game
- Hollywood Reporter - A&E plays mob rule for ‘Sopranos’
- A&E Unveils Sopranos Cross-Media Experience