With the release of the social networking game Corrie Nation, Coronation Street fans can picture their own lives in Weatherfield. Corrie Nation was launched by ITV on November 1, a month before the UK’s, maybe even world’s longest-running TV soap celebrates its 50th birthday.
Patricia Wagstaff, director of digital productions at ITV Studios pointed out that “Coronation Street enjoys a unique place in the hearts of the British public and with an appeal which spans generations, the brand has the potential off screen to match its phenomenal on-screen success”, thus players are probably going to have another to-be-successful game.
The Coronation Street and the city of Weatherfield are duplicated for players to start their virtual lives in the game. Past and present characters from the soap are also picked for players to feature in their own Rovers Return, as well as the underworld knickers factory. Or if you wish, make little changes to the characters and their relationships, for example, you can make Sean Tully a pub boss, rather than an occasional barman; or put Reg Holdsworth and Audrey Roberts under the same roof; or turn Becky and Steve McDonald a pair of good friends. This kind of setups surely stimulates the fans’ as well as players’ desire to write brand new plots in their hearts.
Users will be able to compete against, or on the contrary, collaborate with friends, of course other fans of the soap to build, populate, manage and grow Coronation Street and the virtual Weatherfield in which your own stories will be put on stage over a period of time. Adding on-screen characters and performing tasks and storylines for characters will help you progress toward further levels, while you will be able to choose tasks that reflect what you think the characters should do in current Corrie storylines, rather than tasks simply assigned to you. Points earned as you progress through levels of the game can be exchanged for storyline spoilers that are presented as “psychic predictions” from one of the characters.
While mentioning Corrie Nation’s combination of the world’s two biggest entertainment industries, Patricia Wagstaff said: “Corrie Nation is a great example of engaging with the Coronation Street audience in new ways and exploiting this world-class brand to deliver further revenues to the business.”
Facebook on which Corrie Nation is launched has more than 500 million members worldwide while Coronation Street, at its peak, had 26.6 million viewers for the Christmas Day episode in 1989.The hand-in-hand of the two enables Corrie Nation to pool millions of players. With this amount of players playing the game, it will undoubtedly provide great pleasures no matter you are on or off the game.
