Niantic, the San Francisco-based augmented reality company behind Pokémon Go, announced Tuesday it is partnering with U.K.-based production company Punchdrunk, which made a name for itself with its critically acclaimed immersive theater experience called Sleep No More. Together, the companies plan to “reinvent storytelling for a 21st century audience and further expand the horizon of interactive entertainment.”
Sleep No More was first performed in London in 2003, and it has since been running in New York City since 2011. The piece, which is primarily based on William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, requires audience members to walk through a series of rooms at their own pace to experience various storylines. Predictably, the show has been significantly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has resulted in hiatuses and layoffs.
Meanwhile, Niantic has been making several acquisitions and content deals over the years with companies like Qualcomm and French game publisher Asmodee to disrupt the AR space, with the larger goal of creating a playable map of the world that can be used by different games and apps. The company also says it is working on more than 10 new games centered around wearable AR devices and “innovative gameplay,” namely, a mobile AR adaptation of the board game Settlers of Catan, which is scheduled to enter beta phase “very soon.”
“As we experiment with new forms of gaming on mobile and AR glasses, we are pushing notions of real-world gaming forward,” Niantic said in a recent blog post.
“At Punchdrunk we create richly cinematic 3D worlds where the audiences can explore, touch and smell the environment; where the boundaries between reality and fantasy are indistinguishable,” Felix Barrett, Punchdrunk’s artistic director, added. “I believe that Punchdrunk and Niantic can create something that has never been done before. They do it in AR, we do it in real life. Collide the two and I think we will blow people’s minds, bend the rules of genre and redefine the norms of mobile gaming.”
