Much excitement here at Zoë Mode that Chime is about to hit the virtual shelves. It’s been a long and unusual road to release, beginning almost 4 years ago with a design document titled “Cascade – A Musical Puzzle Game”. My original concept was different to the end result in many ways but the central idea remains intact – by placing objects within a space representing musical time and frequency, players could build musical patterns and solve spatial puzzles.

As a bit of an interactive music geek, my emphasis was on the music and the technology allowing every player-generated sound to conform to a musical rule set. The next stage was to tighten up the gameplay, so Zoë’s Creative Director Ste Curran got involved and the single-cell objects in the original design became 5-cell shapes (pentominoes).

Zoë’s original concepts are incubated in “The Lab” – Ste’s own private militia of maverick developers, spewing forth creativity through a haze of bubbling fluids in their secret, state of the art undersea lair. By the time they were done with it, the game had a shiny new name, Chime, and was more or less the game it is now.

What with having a LOT of other games to make, this all happened s-l-o-w-l-y, but by the end of 2008 we knew we had something a bit special – still a prototype, but full of old-school addictiveness.

That’s where OneBigGame comes in. The games industry isn’t all hard of heart and tight of fist – we thought it was a noble venture, worth supporting, so we got on board and donated Chime. Thanks to OBG’s Martin De Ronde, and Nimrod Productions’ Marc Canham, we hooked up with the superb artists who were generous enough to donate their music to the cause. And now it’s done.

Here’s hoping that people enjoy the game, and plenty of money is raised for Save The Children and the Starlight Children’s Foundation to help the brilliant and essential work they do.

Ciaran Walsh

Audio Director  – Zoë Mode