OneHundredDogs

It is a Facebook ARG (alternate reality game) designed to be played in 50 cities across the country. In each city, local dogs will compete to become the city's AlphaDog. Each AlphaDog then becomes DogOne, DogTwo, DogThree.... DogFifty. That's when you meet the other 50 dogs - all virtual (and maybe with real world owners, too). Cities compete with one another, then work together to work their way up the scale, solving missions on a national level as they go. Ultimately, all 50 dogs will need to work together to solve a serious problem at the top.

# 2008-12-26 06:37:42 - official description - onehundreddogs.com

It's a videogame, for dogs. Yes, for dogs. The players, are dogs.

This was an entry in the GDC 2008 Game Design Challenge. The task was to create a game with real animal players. It is the only entry thus far to actually be made into a real game.

Alexey Pajitnov had "a very modest idea and very awful presentation." He called it Dolphin Ride. It's a team-based game, meant for a dolphin and two humans, one playing navigator and the other shooting. The dolphin would be outfitted with a harness that had two virtual cabins on it, one for the navigator and one for the shooter. Each cabin would have a camera and transmitter so that the players could see the dolphin's environment as it swam around. Balls of varying point values would be virtually superimposed on the images sent back from the cameras. The navigator would guide the dolphin towards the balls, and the shooter would take the balls out with the paintball gun that was in the shooter cabin. The object of the game was simply to amass more points than the other dolphin/human teams by destroying balls. This idea won.

Steve Meretzky designed a game with bacteria as the antagonists. He called it Bac Attack. A 'TrayStation device' consisting or a petre dish and sensors to input the condition of it would be used. The dish with bacteria would represent the terrain for a medieval-themed strategy game. The human player would need to defend his territory from virtual soldiers representing each and every bacteria in the dish. Periodically, the dish is zapped with microwaves, killing off the weaker bacteria.
"the mutated bacteria that reached the level cap would be worth a fortune to the bio-tech industry. The game that makes germ warfare available to the whole family. The game that puts the fun back in fungicide.The world's first massively microplayer game, Bac Attack." - Steve Meretzky

(Zerothis) - # 2008-12-26 06:38:56

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This was never intended to be anything more than a prototype for the GDC, the author did leave the future open but has not said anything about it since and considering how the official website and any information about it has disappeared since, we can presume that this ARG didn't quite last.

Sanguine # 2012-07-06 04:20:20