Shakespeare's Globe
Client
Shakespeare's Globe
Type
Game design
Tools
Photoshop, Illustrator
A few years back, London's famous Shakespeare's Globe Theatre celebrated Shakespeare’s 450th birthday. Instead of the usual cake, they decided to mark the anniversary by launching a series of video games, aimed at introducing kids and teens to his most famous plays.
For this ambitious project, my role was to conceptualise, design, and manage the production of three games.
Learning through play.
The games are inspired by three particularly famous plays: Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and The Tempest. The client asked us to use the mascots they’d created (and used for ages) to promote the theatre to children. So, the obvious question was: how on earth do you combine Shakespeare's plays with mascots?
Right from the early brainstorms, we decided to use the plays and characters to reveal the backstage life of the Globe Theatre, along with the trials and tribulations of putting on major productions.
And so we created Casting Call, inspired by Romeo and Juliet, where the player has to match pairs of polaroids (just like the classic game of Memory). Then there's Prop Hunter, where the player has to run up and down the prop room grabbing stage props in a specific order. We finish with a bang with The Tempest, where we finally get to see a play on stage and the player has to hurl lightning bolts at a ship tossing in the waves.
Keeping the target audience in mind, each game was carefully designed to be stimulating, but not impossibly hard. Even the negative feedback is good fun, thanks to playful animations and the characters' goofy expressions. I spent HOURS crafting the perfect look for the electrocuted seagull.
Once the designs were nailed down, I collaborated with the dev team through every stage of production. I made sure the games worked flawlessly, fine-tuning every single interaction, animation, and transition.
The games went down an absolute storm and won several awards, including the New Media Awards (Arts and Culture - Best in Industry) and the Web Awards (Education Standard of Excellence and Non-Profit Standard of Excellence)—most likely thanks to the pivotal contribution of the electrocuted seagull.
