Pushbutton Develops New Interactive TV Gambling Game for Sky Vegas

UK-based interactive TV design company, Pushbutton, announced last month that it has teamed with gambling channel, Sky Vegas, to launch an interactive TV version of the arcade-style, "tumbling faces" gambling game, "Chain Reactors," on the latter's service on the UK's Sky satellite-TV platform. In order for a player to win money, a series of what Pushbutton describes as "amusing and quirkily animated tumbling faces" must match up in clusters of at least five in a grid. Lining up the faces causes a "chain reaction," wherein the matched faces disappear in a puff animation. New faces then tumble down the screen to replace them. Pushbutton says that "the fun part of the game is when your luck is in, and you start to get multiple chain reactions."

The game features three levels of progressive jackpot, including a "Maxi Jackpot" of £100,000. It also offers a "Free Play" option that lets viewers play for fun without the opportunity to win prizes. Pushbutton says that it worked closely with Sky Vegas to deliver the game on time and on budget, to an exacting schedule, and that it is "particularly proud" of the game's animations and sound effects. It claims that it was able to reproduce on the set-top box many of the "subtle UI effects," that it says made the Web-based version of the game so successful: for example, the company says, the characters in the grid are animated even when idle, and exhibit "surprise" and other behaviors as the grid empties and fills. The explosions of the game's "chain reactions" are also color-coded to each character. Pushbutton says that "clever development" means that the game's animation is "super-fast," even on the slowest legacy set-tops. "'Chain Reactors' is the latest in a series of successful projects for Sky Vegas and its quality proves Pushbutton's credentials in developing TV-based gambling and arcade-style games," Pushbutton managing director, Paula Byrne, said in a prepared statement.