Berklee is working with Metaversal Studios to take the pain out of music theory and bring the the joy of music to middle schools and high schools. The PULSE music program brings the Berklee curriculum to youth nationwide, using well-known and well-loved music instead of simple exercises. Students learn music theory and ear training through games and other interactive musical explorations while rocking out with the likes of Green Day and the Ramones.

Fidelity Investments hired us to create an in-house training game for... well, we can't exactly tell you, because it's a secret! However, we can tell you that in working with us, Fidelity has begun to discover the power of educating its employees through games. Entertaining multimedia elements reinforce the message while stimulating a competitive drive to succeed. Because of the confidential nature of this project, we couldn't show you a real screen shot here, but we'll tell you that the thermometer doesn't stay down low when the game is running. Things get pretty hot pretty fast!

Fidelity Investments joined the ranks of our satisfied repeat customers with another top-secret in-house training game. Once again, entertaining multimedia elements reinforce the message while stimulating a competitive drive to succeed. Because of the confidential nature of this project, we can't show you a screen shot, but we will say that there are a lot of extended and amusing metaphors involved...

CHN hired us to develop a video demo of a videogame that would demonstrate creative new ways of teaching difficult science concepts to junior high school students. This game's roots are firmly in the old-school "beat-'em-up" and "platformer" genres, but its plot is all 21st century. In Geckoman, students play Harold, a kid whose science fair project has gone awry, shrinking him to the nano scale. Students learn about VanDerWaals forces (tiny forces that enable creatures like Geckos to defy gravity), capillary forces (tiny forces that make tiny objects "stick" to liquids), and electrostatic forces (tiny forces that attract or repel based on electric charge). The game is now in "open beta", with an even-level preview available now.

We worked in collaboration with the NU Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering on a National Science Foundation grant to explore expanding a student-developed game (which was part of her 2001 graduate thesis) into a networked computer game. The first step involved a complete redesign of the game: streamlining the mechanics, enhancing the simulation elements, and creating new original graphics and supplementary educational materials. This prototype was then used to study the group dynamics of the "millenial" students who will, in the future, be the audience for the computer game. A computer game prototype was buit in Spring of 2007. In September, 2007, the project recived a Phase II grant from the National Science Foundation, which will fund further development on the game over the next three years.

We spent the first part of this year working with Callaway on an exciting new way of improving your golf game. Yes, yours. However, the product has not yet been publicly announced. We can only tell you that we worked closely with their research and development folks to improve both the visual and computational aspects of a golf simulation. It was a lot more fun than it sounds, really!

The founders of So Near, LLC designed the framework for this chat-based game about peer leadership and being true to oneself. We worked with them to refine game play coded both the game client and server scripts. We also provided artistic support, designing many of the interface elements and clothing items found throughout the game. However, our main achievement in this product was the architecting of our first massively multiplayer online game.

FXPort hired us to create a game about the science and politics of biofuels. Starting with their scientific data, we worked with them to develop a storyline and game mechanism that combines mini-games, social networking, street racing, and rock-and-roll! The game prototype was developed in 2007; the distributor and final release date have not yet been announced.

In 2006, Boston College hired us to create three projects for them: an in-house presentation system, an exploratory site for a literature class, and an educational site. Fortunately, of these projects, the best of the three is the one we're allowed to show outside the confines to the school! This educational site enables users to explore the architectural development of Rome during the Renaissance using a novel timeline-plus-map hybrid interface. It's like Google Maps for time travel! Okay okay, there's no game involved in this one, but we agreed to do it because it was a fascinating project that gave us some good ideas for future Internet gaming. It also planted the seeds for Memeo, our latest BC project.

After our success with The Shelley Project and Rome: Caput Mundi, Boston College hired us for a third project: the creation of a database-driven educational multimedia delivery system that enables instructors to create new interactive presentations using the innovative interface elements from our earlier BC educational projects. This product is the best demonstration yet of Metaversal's ablity to develop complex yet accessible systems. Using a combination of Actionscript 3.0, PHP/MySQL, and JavaScript/AJAX technologies, we built a flexible content management system that helps instructors and students to establish and discover new links between content elements. It also looks darned pretty. Memeo is not yet available for public viewing, as content modules are still being developed.

Harvard Business School Publishing hired us to work with them to explore possible scenarios for bringing business case studies to the web in new and exciting ways. Working with HBSP and another development company, we spent a month looking at the future "look" of games in educational. Unfortunately, although our consulting is over, this project is still deep in development, so we won't be able to show you anything for a while to come!

Aerosmith's web publicity managers hired us to produce an adaptation of our original puzzle game WordMaze, customized for the 2006 Aerosmith tour. We created two puzzles, one based on tour cities and one based on song titles, and added custom graphics and a rockin' soundtrack. The result? Praise from all five members of Aerosmith, and increased traffic to their web site!

The City of Boston and The Boston Globe hired us to create a game with both a real-world and an online component for SIGGRAPH, the world's largest computer graphics conference, which was held in Boston in August, 2006. We created a treasure hunt that involved finding four postcards hidden around the exhibit floor as well as around Boston. Clues were also published in newspapers and online at Boston.com. Thousands tried to solve the puzzle; a few over 100 succeeded. One lucky winner got a video iPod!

A new twist on the "falling blocks puzzle" theme, this game was published by Shockwave.com and AddictingGames.com the month before Halloween, 2006. In ZombieDrop, players move the board instead of the pieces (as the board is made up of morgue drawers) and try to match heads, torsos, and bodies to bring back the dead! Amusing graphics and original gameplay made this game a popular hit even before it was officially announced on the site!

CenSSIS hired us to develop a game prototype to teach math and science skills to middle and high school students through simplified real-world problems. An Engineering Research Center (ERC), CenSSIS studies the diverse problems of "hidden worlds beneath the surface": everything from finding pollution in coral reefs to finding tumors in the human body to, most recently, landmine detection. We developed an initial prototype based on the distance formula and the Pythagorean Theorem, and then observed one of the CenSSIS PhD students teaching a group of 9th graders how to solve the problem presented in the game. We then took his chalkboard lesson and translated it into an interactive "handbook" which enables students to learn at their own pace. The three-level demo shows how we engage the students with a seemingly "easy" problem and then gradually increase the difficulty while still maintaining a sense of fun. After all, who doesn't love robot dogs?

Originally MIT asked us to propose a "one minute thank-you" to their alumni donors, but as we began discussions, it became clear that what they really needed was a game. No, really! It was their idea! So we worked with them to determine the most important message to convey to new prospective donors, deciding ultimately on "the importance of unrestricted giving". Both the gameplay and the messages between the 15 challenging levels of this arcade game emphasize this message. The result? Fantastic feedback from alumni, and a 2006 CASE Gold award, the highest honor from the Council for Advancement and Support of Education, in the Digital Media category.

MIT hired us to create a sequel to the CASE-award winning 2005 game that we created for them. The game was launched in December, 2006 as part of the annual fundraising ask that was sent over to 30,000 MIT alumni. The result? MIT reports that over 20,000 alumni have raised over $23 million for the school. Sure, it's not all thanks to our game, but we've helped to draw attention to MIT's needs for the last two years. We hope that as long as we keep coming up with ways for the H-Bot to hassle the 'Tute, MIT, will keep letting us tell their story with our unique blend of humor and style.

Will the MIT madness ever end? We hope not! For the third year in a row, the Alumni Association asked us for a game, and this year we gave them not only one game, but two! Okay okay, they're both just versions of Concentration, but as always, we tried to give it the Metaversal sense of humor combined with the MIT braininess and zaniness.

The New England Aquarium originally wanted a simple "drag and drop matching" game to teach children about the jellyfish life cycle, but we felt there was a much more interesting game in there. The result, "Lifecycle Catch", challenges players to catch 3d-rendered jellyfish in a virtual ocean through a series of increasingly difficult levels that convey all the material from the original matching game concept, reinforcing the concepts through repetition and variation of information on each level.

A second challenge brought to us by the aquarium was to develop a game based on their classroom teaching materials that conveyed the effect of humans on aquatic life cycles and food chains. We combined multiple classroom activities into "Jellytown", a "sim" game that challenges the player on three levels: they must manage a small fishing town's growth, keep the ocean stocked with fish, or do both at the same time!