EDMONTON — A new free mobile game is immortalizing the “aura of power” — a phrase made infamous by the recent scathing report into former premier Alison Redford’s expenses.
Alberta’s auditor general used the term last month to describe what he believes prevented anyone in Redford’s office from questioning her spending. The phrase quickly became a top trending topic across the country, and caught the eyes of Edmonton online developers at Rocketfuel Games.
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“I thought ‘hmm..aura of power, that would be kind of an interesting game. Even as a title in and of itself,'” recalled the company’s CEO and creative director, Jason Suriano.
His team got to work, and a couple weeks later they came up with what Suriano describes as a playable satirical cartoon.
“I guess you could call it more of like a next generation political cartoon.”
“There are some serious undertones in it, I guess, because of what the content entails in the game. But the game itself was designed to be a little bit humourous.”
The game has “Alison” collecting diamonds while having to dodge journalists and what appear to be icebergs on the way to “Sky Palace.” Except the developers threw in a bit of a curve ball.
“You can keep playing it as long as you can but you can never really reach the sky palace,” explained Suriano, “because the sky palace from what everyone’s been told has not been built. So we just thought that would be kind of a funny twist to the game. You can never really get Alison to the sky palace for multiple reasons.”
Suriano maintains that the game is not affiliated with any party, and is actually his company’s first foray into the political landscape.
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“Our team is made up average Albertans. Most of us kind of sigh and roll our eyes when we see stuff like that and all we thought was, ‘Well, maybe this is our chance to do something funny and maybe get people in the province to have a bit of a laugh about it.'”
The game is available for download on Android through Google Play, and on iOS devices through iTunes.
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