Portugal 1111: a conquista de
Soure, is a computer game produced by Ciberbit, a portuguese company, with
the support of the city of Soure. I was responsible
for coordinating the content, that is the historical
background, the model that regulated the interaction
of all the aspects (economic, commercial, military,
religious) and coordinating the work of military
history experts, musicians, artists, etc... I also did
the level design (map construction and difficulty
tuning) and gave my voice to one of the units. The
game has a web page at http://www.portugal1111.com.
The game was distributed with a major weekly magazine in April 2004, for an extra 9.50 EUR. The 25.000 copies distributed sold-out very quickly.
The game generated a lot of feedback from the gamer community. The game forum on the Internet (since deactivated) attracted many messages about historical aspects. There were many questions on historical details and the community self-organized quickly, with knowledgeable members clarifying aspects and creating thought provoking discussions. The game also triggered interesting and passionate discussions about the illegal copying of portuguese software, with many persons considering that it was not in the interest of the community of gamers at large to promote illegal copying of the game.
Here you can find records of those discussions and feedback from gamers, both in the game's official forum and elsewhere in the internet (in portuguese).
Messages about History
Love it, hate it.
To copy or not to copy, that is the question
Most of the original posts shown above are no longer available, But some are still there (september 2006):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgP7zIy6x6o
http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/portugal1111aconquistadesoure/player_review.html?id=265185
http://www.microcaos.pt/forum/showthread.php?t=1766
http://www.gildot.org/articles/04/04/19/1736205.shtml
http://weblogs.pontonetpt.com/pre/posts/935.aspx
http://sylvinhaemportugal.blogs.sapo.pt/4756.html (our favorite)
Also of interest:
Minimal article in the portuguese wikipedia (it was not me, I swear):
http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portugal_1111:_A_conquista_de_Soure
A PowerPoint presentation of the project is available in the downloads section.