Sprites from the Game
In 2000 Heineken became the official sponsors of the European Rugby Cup. Whitbread (the owners of the UK franchise) set about making the Heineken brand synonymous with international rugby, and the European Rugby Cup became the Heineken Cup. Whitbread came to Agency.com looking for an email marketing campaign to capitalise on the media event and build the brand online. In early discussions it became clear that what Whitbread really wanted was a game.
I developed and pitched concepts, designed the game-play and wrote the Lingo code (Director 7) - and all that in five days, phew! The 3D models for the sprites where created, also fanatically quickly, by Asa Medhurst.
The Heineken game ran for the duration of 2000 Heineken cup. During those six weeks it received nearly 30,000 visits from an estimated 13,500 users from which over 2,800 valid email addresses were successfully collected. Agency.com went on to build another game for the Heineken Cup in 2001 with a bigger team. The game it self was also later re-skinned and resold to another client.
The image above, is the result of a process I developed for creating really fast rendering sprites that still look nice and smooth. I don't know if there's a proper name for the technique, but I call it faux-anit-aliasing.
