Kickstarter

Good ideas come out of thin air. Last week we were wondered if it would be possible to make a music game just 100% based on motion. No touch required, just motion of the iPhone and motion of our guitar pick. It's quite a radical departure from what we've been working on so far and probably quite different than existing mobile music games. 

One of the cool things in Silicon Valley is, is that there's always a cool geek event just around the corner and lucky for us, a great event ('The Muther of all Hackathons') was just days away. If you're not familiar with the term hackathon. Imagine hundreds of nerds gathering and hacking on crazy apps for a full day. And night. A hackathon is a great environment to try out crazy ideas and to get inspired by other people with ideas possibly even crazier than yours. The Muther of all Hackathons was specifically targeted at mobile app developers and we spend over 24 hours at the Computer History Museum (go see it, it has been recently remodeled and it's the ultimate geek paradise!) in Mountain View hacking on our 'no-touch music game' idea. We briefly considered sneaking into the museum exhibit area at night and see if we could use a Cray supercomputer to speed up compile time but eventually decided it wasn't such a good idea (Cray has a different computer architecture than the iPhone, you know). 

The end result after 24h+ of hacking? A working (!) demo of a game that can best be described as "Guitar Hero meets Dance Central, but mobile. And with badges" (actually, there are no badges in the game, but since every startup nowadays thinks it cool to have badges, I thought it would be cool to claim we have badges too, even though we don't. Yet) 

The game play is easy to understand and quite addictive: To start the game, hold a "Bruce Springsteen pose" (this sentence might make better sense after watching the video below) for a couple of seconds (and don't move!). Next the game will ask the user to perform certain motion in the rhythm of the song. For example: strum quickly, strum slowly, hold still (I didn't hold still and that's the scratching record sound you hear in the video), etc.

Our app was voted by a jury of VC's and mobile entrepreneurs "Best new app" at the Hackathon, a $25,000 prize (in publicity, booth at a CTIA Wireless Conference and a lot more). Wow :)

I hope the video gives a brief overview of how fun the game is. Personally, I think this concept has a lot of potential and I would like to hear from you, dear backers, what you think. Should we continue this path or should we go back to a more traditional Guitar Hero 'press the button' type of game play?