Birmingham gamers court investors after Canadian success

A BIRMINGHAM gaming company is hoping to secure new investment after its latest product attracted interest at a major international film festival.

Birmingham Science Park-based start-up wallFour’s Renga is a ground-breaking game which can be played on a cinema screen and involve up to 100 simultaneous players.

The game, which shares mechanical similarities with ‘Space Invaders’ and ‘Civilization’, is entirely shaped by the audience. Each player is tasked with building and managing the resources of a battered spaceship, while defending it from an encroaching on-screen alien force. The audience must work as a team to negotiate each round, communicating with each other and collaborating – on and off screen – in order to ensure their ship’s survival.

Renga was aired at the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this month and was well received. It is also being displayed at this weekend’s Palo Alto International Film Festival in California, where it will receive a $1,000 award for best new platform.

wallFour, a member of the science park’s Entrepreneurs for the Future programme, will then move on to the New York Film Festival, where it hopes to create even more of a buzz.

Renga enables a cinema audience to directly control multiple elements of the feature-length game in parallel by pointing hand-held lasers at the screen. The Toronto festival, which attracts more than 250,000 people and is only topped by Cannes in terms of industry significance, hailed the game as ‘the future of interactive cinema’.

Adam Russell, co-founder of wallFour, said: “For Renga to be celebrated at the North American film festivals is creating so many proud – and somewhat unbelievable – moments. Rather than pitching our concept, waiting to see if we’ve made the selection, and then funding the trips ourselves, the festival organisers are arranging and paying for our travel and accommodation, with VIP receptions and cash awards.

“We are now looking to maximise this international exposure by actively seeking investment, which will enable us to create a polished, scalable version of the game, which can then be rolled out to cinemas across the globe.”

The game was viewed by a sell-out cinema audience of 227 people, who each paid $18 Canadian to take part in the experience, sharing 100 laser pointers between them. The firm said the positive feedback and press reports had been “quite overwhelming”.

wallFour’s work is said to be a mix of film, video-gaming and theatre. The company was created by two video-game industry experts, who until recently ran what was one of the leading academic games development courses in the world at the University of Derby.

Prior to that, John Sear and Mr Russell both worked in triple-A game development on a number of multi-million pound projects for Codemasters and Lionhead Studios. 

David Hardman, CEO of Birmingham Science Park, said: “wallFour is a first class example of the creative talent and entrepreneurship that is out there promoting Birmingham’s digital capabilities on a world stage.

“As a city, we must do all we can to support and invest in home-grown successes like this, while also making every effort to encourage more like-minded tech entrepreneurs to consider starting up their own business here at the Science Park, where there is a highly established support network and vibrant community.

“Companies like wallFour have the potential to make it big in a very short period of time and could create many high value jobs in the process.”