On Tuesday, Entertainment Games made its big move, introducing Retro World as a Facebook app. In coming months, it plans to launch the game on its own website, www.RetroWorld.com, and on iPhone and Android apps.
If you're a gamer yourself, or have children raised on fast-paced games such as World of Warcraft or Madden NFL, you may find Retro World a little, well, retro. It's a cross between a mystery story and a role-playing quest like Dungeons & Dragons, with arcade-style diversions mixed in.
Want to defuse a bomb that the Russian spy you're chasing has planted on a launchpad? To get there, you first have to play a short Mario-like game, Space Ape Race, that will allow you to scale the heights and save the day.
It's hard to explain Retro World without explaining the perspective that Mauro and his colleagues bring to gaming, or the business model under which they plan to introduce a new episode of the game, almost like a TV series, every 30 to 45 days.
Working with programmers in Massachusetts and writers and designers in California, Mauro and his colleagues, including CEO Jerry Klein and marketing director Rich Siporin, approached the game market as if it were a puzzle.
Only time will tell if they've scored or flopped. But they're trying to draw gamers into stories, so let's start with the one behind Retro World.
The concept. Despite the success of fast-paced games on the latest high-tech platforms, such as Microsoft's Xbox Kinect, Entertainment Games had struggled to sell games that appealed to its older market niche. Though publicly traded since 1995, the company had seen its annual sales peak above $10 million, then dwindle.
