During the 2010 World Cup, Yahoo! network members could challenge a friend to a 1-on-1 penalty shootout game on Yahoo.com. Players faced off in a turn-based strategy of kicks and blocks followed by rich audio and video interstitials dynamically woven based on player choices.

I was hired by Sapient Nitro to assemble and lead the game development team and architect a video assembly solution. I hired 3 Flash contractors and lead a 4-month development effort working closely with Sapient’s backend team.

The game was localized for 17 countries. The stack included Flash, Flex, XMPP, PHP and Java.

The game generated 60 million visits and 2.1 million plays worldwide, 11.6 million minutes in total play time and 16 million social media impressions. Yahoo’s goal of 100k new registered users was exceeded at 440k.