I’m a big fan of HBO’s “Deadwood”.

The first episode of Season Three is premiering as I write this — here’s to whoever invented the PVR (Personal Video Recorder).

Needless to say, I was thrilled when Ryan Anderson from Ottawa’s own “Fuel Industries” let me know that they were the ones behind the new promotional game based on the series called “Dead Man’s Hand”

We just launched a new project for HBO that I thought you might be interested in. As part of the promotion for the third season of Deadwood, we developed a 3D Texas hold’em game where you play against the characters from the show — Al Swearengen, E.B. Farnum, and Trixie. The additional cool factor is that while you play, you’ve got a gun that you can pull and start shooting the place up — it’s actually integral to winning the game. The game requires the download of a plugin called Virtools, which works with every browser and is about the same size as Shockwave. Basically, it allows game developers to deliver console-quality 3D within a browser. We’re still limited by bandwidth, of course, but what you can do with it is pretty amazing. I’m a little biased of course, but this is the most graphically intense promotional game I’ve seen.

Unfortunately, I can’t seem to get the plug-in working on my Mac — despite assurances Virtools supports OS X.

Let me know how you like it.

Bonus Trivia — The origin of the phrase Dead Man’s Hand was explained in an earlier Deadwood episode.

 

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Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on June 12, 2006.