Saturday, October 17, 2009

‘Balloon Boy’ goes from national news story to online video game in record time

Online video game designers have gotten very good at quickly turning national and international news stories into entertaining Internet diversions.
The story of a 6-year-old Colorado boy thought to have been in a runaway helium balloon on Thursday became a Web browser-based video game the next day.
The game, called “Balloon Boy,” was developed by three San Francisco-area software developers for Hey Zap. (See stories by Reuters, Game Politics and Sky News.) The company also made a ripped-from-the-headlines game about the swine flu called “Swinefighter,” when the epidemic first broke out last spring.
You can play “Balloon Boy” for yourself here.
Other topical video games lately have included ones based on the housing market slump and the Ponzi scheme of Wall Street financier Bernard Madoff. Those games are from AddictingGames and Cellufun, respectively.

No comments: