On a crisp November night in Cape Elizabeth, a dozen 20-somethings gathered in a circle, their faces lit up by cell phone screens as the countdown to the slap game began.
“Please spread the word,” the app warned. “Stay away from everyone as much as possible. Anyone can come for you.”
The participants ran out into the darkness. Some headed into the street, some into the forest, and they all laughed.
“You never really know who’s going to come after you,” said Wyatt Tanner, 25, likening the chaos to the young adult book series “The Hunger Games.” “I want to win, I’m running for my life, but I’m also trying to corner my opponent.”
A digital variation on the classic playground tag, Slap is the first game release from Integrated Reality Labs, a new augmented reality gaming company based in Philadelphia whose founders include Cape Elizabeth native Lauren Steidl and Includes Ian Andrusek.
The game uses technology (in this case, a smartphone app) to track and electronically tag (or slap) players as they run around in real time. Slap is loosely based on large-scale in-person games like Assassin, Humans vs. Zombies, and Manhunt, and is designed to be easy to play, scale, and organize.
The technology relies on what Andolsek calls “sensor fusion.” It integrates data from GPS, Bluetooth, and the phone’s internal gyroscope sensor with high-speed 5G cellular networking for live device mapping.
Unlike popular augmented reality games like Pokemon Go and Jurassic World Alive, where digital content is overlaid on the world around you, Slap focuses on “human connection and engagement with the real world,” Steidl said. said.
“It makes sense to put your phone in your pocket and run away,” she said.
The company launched the first round of open beta testing this month. It is available to iPhone users under the name of his SLAP MVP. Andolsek hopes to have about 1,000 people playing Slap by the end of January. He expects that number to approach his 1 million mark by the game’s official commercial launch in 2025.
‘huge appetite’ for games
About 10 years ago, Sean Nissenbaum, now a sophomore at New York University, was playing a geocaching game on his cell phone while playing tag with his friends. He thought tag would be more fun if it were more like geocaching, technologically enabled, and accessible to the masses.
So he started teaching himself to code, and after 10 years, consulted Andrusek, 29, who was working with his father, Scott Nissenbaum, as co-founder and chief operating officer of MyClimb, a social fitness/training app for rock climbers. I proposed.
Andrusek quickly signed up and contacted Steidl, also 29, a former classmate and colleague at the smoothie shop. She worked at Medrhythm, a medical technology startup in Portland. They hired Mark Ilgen, a software developer and former NASA researcher, and the three, along with the younger Nissenbaum, launched Integrated Reality Labs earlier this year.
“I thought the idea of people playing in the real world and using technology to relieve some of the social isolation that technology has caused and reconnect with life was really exciting,” Andrusek said. he said.
There were several tag-style mobile apps on the market, but the duo quickly realized that the games were “terrible” and virtually unusable.
“In fact, I started to wonder if this was technically possible or if it was just impossible,” he says.
Nevertheless, Steidl and Andrusek officially quit their jobs nine months ago and are working on Slap full-time and have filed two patents on the core technology. Steidl lives and works in Maine, while Andrusek splits his time between here and California.
Steidl said they are looking to raise $1 million for the startup, with a little more than 50% stake. The two Cape Elizabeth natives believe the opportunities are nearly limitless. The mobile game market is huge, but it’s actually saturated.
“Pokémon GO showed that there is a huge demand for apps that allow you to move outside of the real world,” Steidl said. “The spaces we focus on disrupting are essentially untouched.”
“Silly fun”
The early 2000s introduced Street Wars, a three-week water gun tournament based on the Assassin game that toured the world from 2004 to 2015. Hundreds of people participated in major cities such as New York, Los Angeles, London, and Paris. In what was essentially a long, high-stakes game of tag, players signed up to corner and defeat their opponents.
Steidl and Andrusek hope to carry that same enthusiasm beyond high school and college.
However, these large-scale games with dozens or even hundreds of players require a lot of coordination. And now, with more technology available, game operators are looking at massive spreadsheets and tracking players across multiple social media platforms and apps.
“We want to streamline this process and bring this experience into one app,” Steidl said. “We’ve eliminated all the unpleasant parts of the experience.”
They also chose to differentiate themselves from games such as: Assassin and humans vs. zombies. Toy weapons such as water guns and Nerf guns often appear. In the wake of the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre, some universities banned games altogether.
“I immediately thought we could do something really different by eliminating water guns and squirt guns and conforming to what the parents and administration accept,” Steidl said. .
“There’s still an element of finding, chasing, and running away,” Andrusek added. “(But) there are no violent elements in our games.”
Cora Dempsey, one of the players who tested the game in Cape Elizabeth this month, described it as “ridiculously fun”, although she left before things got too intense.
“The last few guys were playing to win,” she said.
Dempsey, 23, of Portland, said he’s seeing slapping become more popular as a fun activity for groups of friends and as a way to meet new people. Most of the players in her game were strangers, except for her friend Andrusek. Since then, she has kept in touch with some of the people she met.
Tanner, a Scarborough native, didn’t know the other players either. He had met Mr. Steidel and Mr. Andrusek just a few days earlier at the C Salt gourmet market, where they were looking for people to try Slap.
“I think this is a really cool and unique game because I think a lot of people will be playing it on their phones and I don’t think it’s going to really spark a lot of face-to-face interaction.” he said.
He also believes the app opens the door to other games such as Assassin’s Creed, League of Legends, and real-life versions of Fortnite.
Andolsek and Steidl think so, too, and their company has other games in the works.
As for Slap, planned updates to the existing game include increasing the number of players who can join the game and the length of matches. We are also planning to start public matches that anyone nearby can participate in, not just invitees.
“We walk before we run,” Steidl said.
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