NewTech Friday: Hidden Singapore – Singapore’s #1 immersive real-world games
Lim Yee Hung, Co-Founder of Hidden Singapore, an award-winning gaming startup on a mission to uncover the city's hidden stories, has partnered with the SG Mobility Gallery to launch an interactive outdoor adventure game that offers a unique blend of discovery, history and fun. He tells us more about it.
Lim Yee Hung, Co-Founder of Hidden Singapore, an award-winning gaming startup on a mission to uncover the city's hidden stories, has partnered with the SG Mobility Gallery to launch an interactive outdoor adventure game that offers a unique blend of discovery, history and fun. He tells us more about it.
What led to the creation of Hidden Singapore?
The idea came from my previous life as a property developer. I had bought an enormous quarry in the UK, which at the time was leased to HBO for the filming of Game of Thrones.
Because of its dramatic landscape and sheer scale – for reference, the site is more than five times the size of Disneyland in Hong Kong – it had a lot of ‘heritage’, being where many of the noteworthy locations and scenes were filmed. That presented huge logistical challenges and other developers wouldn't touch it with a barge pole. But I saw an opportunity to use technology to enable us to welcome thousands of visitors per day and have them do largely self-guided tours around the site.
So I stumped up my own cash and raised the rest as debt, bought it warts and all, and agreed terms with HBO to turn it into a licensed attraction in 2018. They loved the idea of using technology to power self-guided immersive trails too.
Sadly, the timing could not have been worse because Covid-19 hit less than a year later. All our funding fell away. Dreams crushed, I returned to Singapore and decided to channel all the negative energy into learning how to code, and built Hidden Singapore from the ground up. I already knew exactly what it was going to do, I had been pitching the idea for months to HBO, the government, investors, and everyone I met. So I could just focus on building it myself, and take my mind away from thinking about what could have been.
I have to say, developing software is a lot harder than developing property.
Could you present Hidden Singapore's offer?
We install immersive experiences in places. It could be your local neighborhood, or a park, or even an airport. To do this, we go deep to extract all the hidden stories within it: the secret histories, the heroes and villains, the interesting Did-You-Knows, which we then incorporate into our game. These are things even long-time locals would not know. For example, in my own neighborhood where I created our first game, I was surprised to find out that the entire area was just acres and acres of tombs. All 3,000-odd of them got dug up, turned into ash, and piled into a small rectangular patch of ground just two minutes' walk from my home.
So the game works like this: You turn up with your partner or your friends, start chatting to our virtual cat on WhatsApp, and then she brings you on a trail around different locations in the neighborhood. At each location, you solve a cryptic clue, and she then tells you the hidden stories there, or she brings you into a nearby shop and you get to claim a free gift, like a coffee or a donut. Before you know it, two hours later you have worked your brain, interacted with local businesses, learned so many new things about this area you thought was just ordinary, and now you see it in a totally different light.
One task I have still not delegated to this day is going through all the selfies taken by players during the game, to weed out some of the weird things we get sent (that’s a story for another time), and share the good ones on our website. I do this every night, before I go to bed. Seeing all the smiles and the sweaty faces makes me happy.
What's coming next for Hidden Singapore?
We just incorporated a subsidiary company and it doesn’t have the word Singapore in the name. The plan is to bring this global – you might see our cat conducting games in French soon!
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