Shockwave.Com: Fun and Games on a High-Flying Hub

Shockwave.Com: Fun and Games on a High-Flying Hub
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Frogger gets a retro-redux on Shockwave.com. Courtesy of Shockwave.com. © Atari.

What’s Playing Now
From its premiere last August, shockwave.com has commanded an impressive array of partnerships with media companies, entertainment leaders and interactive developers such as Comedy Central, United Media, Fox Interactive, Hasbro and Marvel. They have amassed a diverse compilation of cartoon classics including shows from South Park, Dilbert and Spider-Man, as well as original animations such as Radiskull, Ed’s Head and Spunky Productions’ The Beatless. On the music front, they offer a wide variety of visual music programming with MP3 quality sound and interactivity featuring content from Streamland Video and others. The games section currently presents ten classic programs from Midway Games (including ‘Defender’ and ‘Marble Madness’), and by using Shockmachine (the site’s unique download "center") consumers can save and play offline full screen Shockwave versions of these hits with a near-identical experience to that of the arcade. Also available are popular branded game titles like ‘Missile Command,’ ‘Centipede’ and ‘Frogger,’ along with the uniquely created and popular 3D ‘Real Pool.’ Included in the creativity area are greeting cards and two recently debuted applications: ‘Toonmaker,’ where users can create personal cards and cartoons, then email them along to friends; and ‘Puzzlemaker,’ which enables the viewer to turn their own photos into puzzles, add messages and send these individual creations out over the net.

Thugs on Film and Like, News, the two immensely popular series from powerhouse Mondo Media, have garnered such strong audience response that shockwave considerably broadened its relationship with the studio early this year. In making a substantial investment in the Bay Area production/distribution company, shockwave is looking to the successful Mondo team for a new fleet of original-to-shockwave series, the first of which are in production now.

Last November, in its first "big-name" creative deal, shockwave entered into a global strategic relationship for the licensing, production and distribution of original content from Stan Lee Media. The arrangement with comic book/pop culture icon Stan Lee includes shockwave’s exclusive net-casting of his premiere web series "7^th Portal," which came online March 1^st of this year. As with Mondo Media, shockwave invested significantly in Stan Lee’s enterprise and so is additionally partnered in all further on and off-line syndication, merchandising and cross-over media potential for the world-wide "7^th Portal" creations. This Flash produced sci-fi series, unveiling Lee’s new good guy/bad guy line-up of 14 action-adventure characters, has become an instant hit over the past few weeks and is currently slated for a first run of 22 five minute episodes. shockwave hopes to roll up a new Webisode every two to three weeks, with production taking place in Stan Lee’s own fully operational digital facilities. More possible franchises between the two companies are in development.