History
The BBC commissioned development of the game in February 2004, shortly before the publication of the independent report by Philip Graf on the BBC's practice in May 2004, which saw the BBC cease its involvement in online fantasy football and surfing stories. The game was initially scheduled for release in early 2005.
For 10 months the BBC worked with outside contractors Preloaded, creator of the various mini-games and puzzles in the game, and Creative Virtual, a specialist in artificial intelligence on-line chat robot technology, to create the game, at a cost of more than £250,000.
On 2005-05-11 the BBC publicly announced that it was calling for beta testers, a move that some alternate reality game commentators considered to be unusually straightforward and open for the world of alternate reality gaming. According to a Preloaded spokesman, this call for testers engendered a response and the game was "tested on hundreds of teenagers".
The game was finally launched on 2005-08-05. The launch incurred some teething troubles, with reports from players that they could not sign in to the web site. Other players commented on the quality of the chat robots, and their inability to respond meaningfully to comments made by players that addressed the central theme of the game.
On 2005-08-13, the game incurred further controversy when the original entry about "Jamie Kane" in Wikipedia reported the fictional biography of the game's central character as if it were fact. Questions were asked about the possibility that the article had been written by someone within the BBC itself with the intention of promoting the game. Rob Cooper responded for the BBC saying that "the BBC would never use Wikipedia as a marketing tool."
The new television series of Doctor Who features a series of interlinked websites which are tied into the official Jamie Kane Website. The site can be accessed by following a series of links set out from the page of Deffry Vale High School which launched on 2006-04-29 to coincide with the broadcast of School Reunion.
Read more about this topic: Jamie Kane
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“Free from public debt, at peace with all the world, and with no complicated interests to consult in our intercourse with foreign powers, the present may be hailed as the epoch in our history the most favorable for the settlement of those principles in our domestic policy which shall be best calculated to give stability to our Republic and secure the blessings of freedom to our citizens.”
—Andrew Jackson (1767–1845)
“Racism is an ism to which everyone in the world today is exposed; for or against, we must take sides. And the history of the future will differ according to the decision which we make.”
—Ruth Benedict (1887–1948)