Apollo Games: 'Wherefore art thou (zap) Romeo?'

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Apollogames.ca is an innovative, independent game company located in Guelph, Ontario. Led by a core team of conceptors and programmers with strong experience in design and programming, Apollogames.ca specializes in the design of high quality online games and virtual environments for youth and lifelong learners that are a combination of entertaining and challenging interfaces and unique educational features.

With the launch of its groundbreaking literacy game ‘Speare (patent pending), Apollogames.ca is set to release a range of new games for youth who spend significant time exploring the online game world. Our goal is to produce fun games that educate across a wide range of disciplines and topics for a wide range of learners, from kindergarten through to lifelong learners.

Apollogames.ca also hosts other independent designers whose work meets the standards we have set, and consults with these designers to produce new integrated learning environments that set a new standard for quality and innovation on the web.

The Apollogames.ca site will serve as an ever-expanding portal that aims to stimulate new forms of educational gaming in the larger community of independent designers and to host those games within a cutting-edge design and technical environment.

Our aim is to entertain and educate simultaneously, with equal attention to both these aspects of any game; and we recognize that games are an important but substantially underused way of learning effectively.

We are community-based, collaborative, and committed to producing the highest quality games for young minds that can be found on the web.

Apollogames.ca is a wholly owned subsidiary of SpeareCorp.com.Inc.

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

'Wherefore art thou (zap) Romeo?'

Shakespeare video game teaches students his tragic love story by having them `shoot down spaceships and stuff'

Apr 24, 2007 04:30 AM

Daniel Girard
Education Reporter

What light through yonder window breaks? It is a video game and Juliet is the star!

On the 443rd anniversary of William Shakespeare's birth, the University of Guelph yesterday launched an interactive adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, using 21st century technology in an attempt to get schoolchildren excited about English literature's most famous writer.

Entitled 'Speare, the video game requires the player to lead "an elite squadron of spacecraft" to overcome a dangerous enemy, which has plunged the entire Prospearean Galaxy "into an age of dark despair" by capturing the ancient text of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.

A successful mission, the narrator says in the game's introduction, will do nothing less than "restore literature, knowledge and peace to the universe – to usher in a new age of compassion and learning."

While such a take on the tragic love story might cause literary scholars to bristle, Shakespeare to turn in his grave and tweens to roll their eyes, those responsible see the game as a logical and powerful way to improve the literacy of kids aged 10 to 15 and interest them in the Bard's works.

"If I write my extremely scholarly article on Romeo and Juliet as an anti-war story, how many of the kids out there in grade school and high school are going to pay attention? Zero," said Daniel Fischlin, a Guelph English professor and one of the game's creators.

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