Chromaroma was a London-based location game that turned everyday commuting into competitive play, launched on 30 November 2010 by the game studio Mudlark. Players linked their Oyster card and Barclays Cycle Hire accounts to the Chromaroma website, which awarded points for the stations they passed through and the journeys they completed on the London Underground, London Buses and the cycle hire scheme, popularly known as Boris bikes. The game was pitched by its creators as a location-based take on a trading-card-style contest, turning routine travel data into a competitive game with public leaderboards that ranked players by their real-world travel activity. Registration was required to play, and the service attracted around 10,000 users before it was shut down; it is now defunct. Chromaroma stood out among early 2010s location games for building its entire scoring system on genuine public transport data rather than manually logged check-ins.
Facts
Sport
Game Type (category) Classification
Player CountLarge Group or Variable 1 In the Other Atlases
Sources
1. Chromaroma (Wikipedia)
Lead description
location-based top trumps
Infobox, Launched
Launched | 30 November 2010
Infobox, Users
Users | 10,000
Lead sentence
Chromaroma was a London-based game using players' Oyster cards and Barclays Cycle Hire accounts.
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