Become a secret agent for the British SIS or the Soviet OGPU – a cutting edge ARG designed by Six to Start for the Young Bond books. Play The Shadow War now.

We designed The Shadow War as a fun and accessible ARG to promote By Royal Command, the final book in Charlie Higson’s Young Bond series. The Shadow War contained seven unique missions that took players into the 1930s world of Young Bond, challenging them to infiltrate a secret meeting, travel across Europe, and track down a mysterious ship in the Royal Docks.

Since the target audience was 9 to 14 year old children, we set the puzzle difficulty to be fun but still engaging, and ensured that missions were short and punchy. However, we also had the goal of conveying the feel of the books through the game, and The Shadow War used a beautiful point-and-click interface for interaction, with plenty of intriguing and atmospheric text woven in.

Visitors to The Shadow War spent an extraordinary amount of time on the website – on average, almost 10 minutes and 17 pages per visit – showing that we had created a truly engaging experience.

Seven Missions for Secret Agents

When designing and developing The Shadow War, we identified some core objectives for the game as a whole:

• Original Gameplay: Missions featured fun and novel game mechanics, such as using Google Maps to travel across Europe by air, land and water, or creating a fake ID to infiltrate a secret meeting
• Great Design: In keeping with the legacy of Bond, all websites were accompanied with beautiful designs, appropriate for the 1930s setting of the game – and for the hidden nature of the British SIS and Soviet OGPU!
• Quick and Easy: Each mission takes only 10-20 minutes to complete, so that visitors don’t have to make a big time commitment to play; our high site visit times demonstrate the success of this strategy.
• Accessible: The Shadow War always kept the barriers to entry low, allowing our young audience to get into the action with a minimum of effort. The game was not designed using Flash, meaning that loading times were kept down, and that visually-impaired players could still participate fully.
• Live Finale: In a tense and dramatic 90 minute live finale that featured Charlie Higson himself, both British and Soviet players stormed ‘Schloss Donnerspitze’. Each team solved a series of puzzles, and ultimately joined forces to rescue a prison and save James Bond, with players sending in thousands of comments and puzzle solutions.

What People Said

• Daily Telegraph: “…the internet could, for once, actually increase book reading among children.” (10 August 2008)
• The Guardian: “A computer game set in the world of 007 to help address declining literacy standards in young boys.” (26 August 2008)
• The Book Swede: “But beyond it having a positive effect, it also is genius marketing. Booksellers and publishers have been bemoaning for years the loss of readers to videogames and their kin. Well, Higson looks to be taking the best of both worlds and combining them. This way, he gets kids to buy his books (with a character lots of boys are interested in, and some older men). This guy should make money hand over fist.” (26 August 2008)

The Shadow War was also featured in Dagens Nyheter, BBC 1, BBC Radio 2, BBC Radio 4, The Bookseller, and Omnivoracious (the offical Amazon books blog).

Learn More

• Listen to an Guardian podcast interview with the lead design of The Shadow War, Adrian Hon:
  
• The Shadow War: Getting Boys to Read (written by the lead designer on our weblog)