If you watched Breaking Bad‘s newest episode on Sunday night, you saw AMC’s on-air promo for “The Walking Dead Social Game”. The social TV game is “a story-based Facebook game based on AMC’s TV series,” according to the network’s blog post. The game was built in partnership with RockYou and is another example of a TV network leveraging the social web to begin promoting a TV show way in advance of it’s premiere date.
The show doesn’t return until October 14th, but instead of leaving the show’s website dead and mundane, the network is now using it to promote the new social game. The Walking Dead brand was of course birthed out of the successful comic book series created by Robert Kirkman. The series continues to thrive having sold out their 100th issue recently at Comic-Con.
Here’s how the game works according to the network:
The game offers a stat system based on the characters’ attributes such as stamina, shooting accuracy, range of movement and vision. As you progress, you earn points, based on your skill, which enables you to improve on these stats. This all allows for players to customize the skill-set of the squad members. No one is safe as even the player’s own Facebook friends may turn and attack as blood-thirsty walkers. The game was developed by Eyes Wide Games of Atlanta, GA.
The game has a giant “Watch On AMC” button on the right and a “Where to watch” on the bottom to help promote tune-in. As you get started, you get to customize your character in a feature that feels like AMC’s long-running Mad Men Yourself campaign. Then you begin completing missions, and if you’re a fan of the show, you’ll love bashing Walkers on Facebook. One of the great parts is the way you kill the Walkers – while it’s not like playing an intense video game, you still need to swing accurately to bash in their head.
Another great evolution of the social TV game that both mixes fun gaming elements combined with a short-form script built for the social web. Here’s the promo for it: