Kevin “Skwerl” Cogill

Client: Visionaire Group / Lion’s Gate
Role: Lead PHP & Facebook Developer
When: 2009

I helped The Visionaire Group develop a ridiculously audacious, envelope-pushing Facebook Application to help support the theatrical release of the Lion’s Gate film Crank 2.

Going far beyond the typical boundaries of promotional Facebook Applications, we set up a series of fourteen complex obstacle courses. Users would get a new one each day for the two weeks leading up to the movie’s opening day. Any brave users who completed all fourteen challenges would be entered into a drawing to win a cash prize.

At any time, you could see which of your friends were playing the game, and how many challenges they had successfully completed.

When a user would accept a challenge, the game would go through a series of shocking Facebook updates of various types; different combinations of status updates, photo uploads, photo tagging, video embeds, friend adding & group joining.

Everything was done according to Facebook’s terms of service, with all necessary user confirmation & permissions granting.

The challenges ranged from the relatively tame, such as posting a shocking viral video, to the disruptive, such as announcing via status update that you “hooked up” with a randomly selected member of the opposite sex from your friends list, all the way up to some downright offensive ones I’ll let you find on your own.

(MOSTLY) FUNCTIONAL DEMO

Since the game was built for a relatively short, very time-sensitive run, many of the features broke after the campaign ended. However, I’ve set up a demo for perpetuity, with those parts disabled. Feel free to take on any of the challenges, if you dare. Those still work.

May 22nd, 2009 | Category: Development | Tags: AJAX, CSS, Facebook API, HTML, Marketing, PHP | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL