I completely forgot about this until I came across these images. Champion paper company had the idea to boost sales of laser printer paper by including a video game in with a pack of paper. Kinda like a box of cereal, just a tad bit weirder :) Anyhow, these images are from a proposal that we did for Champion. They really liked the idea, but in the end decided that the amount of money for a video game was more than what they might get from other forms of advertising. This was probably the strangest thing I have encountered since developing video games.
This is the product the game was to be packaged with.
First proposed game
Second proposed game
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"Paper Plane Flight Simulator 2010" - Design and fly your very own paper plane!
- Use virtual paper and fold it into one of 1000 possible designs or create a brand new paper plane configuration using the hyper imagination button
- Add clip art, logos, or create your own design using the built-in image fun-ipulator
- Easy Controls! Hold down the mouse button, pull the mouse back, and RELEASE! Watch it fly!
- 1st person and 3rd person camera view!
- Multiplayer battles!
and finally
- Print your design! Follow the fold instructions on paper to recreate your custom paper plane and fly it in real life!
You do risk diluting the economy of the game, but it would be an interesting experiment.
That is a great idea!! Well scoped feature set, and you even encourage the use of their product by printing the paper airplane designs!
Ian - I honestly can not remember what the budget was like....if memory serves me correct something like 50-75K.
Post-ship support, overheads of running a business, surviving until the next contract need to be included.