Scottish Soccer Coach Launches App Inspired By Bored Players Traveling To Matches
A new app specifically aimed at keeping soccer players entertained while traveling to and from matches has launched, created by Mark McGhee, the current assistant coach of the Scottish national soccer team.
Puzzler NAME GAME was first prototyped by McGhee, an ex-professional player, when he played for Scottish club Aberdeen in the 1980s, using just paper. McGhee was inspired by a conversation with current Scotland national soccer team head coach Gordon Strachan to resurrect the idea and turn it into an app when both grew tired of playing Scrabble together during international football weeks. He approached a technology company in Glasgow, Papertank, which built the app. From there, he showed it to Chris van der Kuyl, a Scottish entrepreneur who helped to develop the wildly popular Minecraft game who gave it the thumbs up.
The new app, based off his earlier paper version, provides users with a set of 16 pairs of initials which must correspond to a famous person’s name, ranging from celebrities to sports stars. Players must then spell the full name correctly, based off a large pool of 100,000 high-profile names. If spelt correctly, the player will earn points, and then the screen is refreshed after each right answer.
Ahead of its launch the app also entered into a partnership with DC Thomson’s Puzzler publisher brand, which is aimed specifically at puzzle fans. The publisher is well known in the U.K. for producing iconic comics including The Beano and The Dandy.
The game, available on Android, iOS and Windows, is also broken down into three game modes and available in six different languages. The first mode, Endurance, finds players answering as many as 500 sets of initials, with no time restrictions. The second, Quickfire, challenges players to answer as many initials sets within five minutes to rack up a high score. The final mode, Hotseat, is a multiplayer game whereby one user answers a set of initials and then passes it onto another user, using the same device.
McGhee, who has also managed a number of clubs in Scotland told the Daily Record: “Gordon and I were playing so much Scrabble that we started to get a bit tired of it. I’m proud I’ve had the gumption to do this, I don’t feel fulfilled in my career as a manager. I’m trying to show people there’s more to me.”
“It was an intriguing story in terms of how the concept came about, with Mark using bits of paper to keep players entertained on a bus,” said Tony Ablewhite, Puzzler’s digital media manager. “Anybody can play this and you watch them getting hooked. I get lots of ideas presented to me and this is the first one I’ve bought into as a concept that we would definitely invest in. It’s got the right ingredients to be big.”
It has also been reported that a TV production company is in talks to make a pilot for a quiz show and also that it could potentially be turned into a board game.
