Chartboost Mobile Gaming Hackathon!

We put out the call for developers and designers far and wide to join us in the first of what will be many mobile gaming hackathons.We kicked it off with a party on Friday, where participants got to meet each other, teamed up and networked with other professionals of the mobile industry. The meetup was seasoned with good beer and wine and Justin?s music, our DJ-in-Residence.Two days, 80 Red Bull, and 52 Chinese takeout containers lat; our seven teams submitted some awesome and innovative games. The judges sized up the mobile games based on innovation, fun, graphics, gameplay and vitality to decide who deserved the first and second prizes.

Caption: The Hackathon Judges, Christoph Birkhold (Head of Studio at Natural Motion) , Vikram Lakwara (Business Analyst SKT Ventures) and Sean Fannan (our co-founder and CTO).The winning team sliced and typed their way to victory with Typing with Strangers: Ninjas vs. Dragons. The game uses wifi and bluetooth networks to connect players in the same vicinity to battle against fireball-hawking dragons. The weapon: your two thumbs. Race to type the words underneath the dragon to nunchuk them back to the reptilian cave they crawled out of. Their hard work was rewarded with $2000 cash, 1 month of free office at StartupHQ, free advertising on Natural Motion?s games and 1 year of free hosting on Rackspace.Second place was secured by Friendly Feud, a quiz show themed app that tests your knowledge of your Facebook friends. Bret Redinger and Adam Mork worked around the clock Friday and Saturday to polish the game before Mother?s Day brunch. The duo say they hope to release the app soon, presumably so they can play it on the new iPads they took home along with the silver medal.Rahil Patel?s multiplayer game for iPad, Doodletangle, landed him $100 giftcard to iTunes. In the game, users must move their fingers through a moving maze, without hitting the walls or getting tangled by one of the other 10 limbs on the board. It?s like Hole in the Wall?for iPad!The Qualcomm and Twilio awards went to Rauhmel Fox, who began work on a location based app which used Qualcomm?s geo-fencing API. Look out for more updates on SpideyZin as he continues production over the summer.Rounding out the submissions:Bar Back Joe by Angelo Hizon, William Ogle, Phil Wee and Angie Chang: Mix and send drinks to friends while trying to earn tips and become the best mixologist in the city.ZombiPit by Amir Szekely and Will Wright: Mass murdering zombies that are stuck in a pit, do you really need to know anymore to be excited for this release?!Beta Breakers by the Chartboost Business Team: Sharkles needs to make it as far as he can in this Bay to Breakers themed side scroller. Beware of drunk jelly fish and sea horse cops handing out citations! (Believe us when we tell you the marketing and monetization plans are really the shining stars of this app)