There are a lot of writings based around the 2165 era. Generally it’s Cyberpunk novels such as Snowcrash by Neal Stephenson, William Gibson’s Neuromancer, and many more. The mix of “high tech and low life” is what make it interesting.

The movies of those times tended to start out weak, but now are less low-budget anime and more Hollywood budget with impressive stories. Along the way some of the groundbreaking cyberpunk/near future films are Akira, Ghost in the Shell, the Matrix movies and, of course, the immortal Blade Runner.

They combine together and bring to life 2165: SpyBattle. But they are not exactly, 2165 as we see it. SHG’s world of 2165 is a world of radical life and health extension. Everyone can live literally forever. Lose a limb and it regrows. Aging? Bah! That’s in old stories. Nanobots (very tiny robots) in your cells implement all the medical advances that humans and their increasingly powerful computer systems can imagine. Where it all goes wrong in 2165 is that resources are depleted; oceans are 200 ft taller. Outside the remaining fabulous cities are wastelands being scavenged by machines that harvest fewer and fewer resources.

When scarcity arises humans get nasty. Flamethrowing competition for a $100 buck nasty. Gang Battles for control of cities nasty. They also get bored. What we call extreme sports become everyday events. So Nuke Bike Gangs roam those wastelands looking for harvesting machines to pick off. Even in cities the rich dine well, but Agents hide amongst them stealing and backstabbing as they can.

Our 2165 is the logical outcome of the future based on certain factors. Anything that doesn’t seem logical has a logical background piece although the players may not see it (yet).

Cyberpunk, or at least some of the elements, are alive and well in Hollywood.

The movie “In Time” is about radical life extension, and assumes the birthrate doesn’t change, and so that new humans may only live a minimal amount of time. The amount of time you have is tracked, and that becomes a new form of wealth. It’s an interesting take on a story, but the narrative is full of holes. For example, why are 25-year-olds expected to add value in a world of sharp, weathly oldsters? Shouldn’t children’s time come off their parent’s allotment? There is a good write up of what the story leaves out in terms of logical radical life extension here.

Another new, potentially interesting and related high budget show is Terra Nova. It’s a weekly TV series about about a family from 2149 travelling back 85 million years to live with dinosaurs. It’s not what you think. Less Jurassic Park, or even Avatar and more Seventh Heaven with Dinosaurs in the background. Not good.

They did however create a top notch world in 2149 based on hard fact. It had a lot of 2165’s dystopian features, and did a fantatic job of putting the lack of resources into all parts of life in 2149. Well at least in the limited screen time 2149 actually received.

If you are interested in one of the books we view as a starting place of thought then check out the transhumanist Ray Kurzweil’s Age of Spiritual Machines. The basic ideas make sense, although the timeframes seem to be compacted to match his life time. Still the ideas are interesting and partially in play in Snakehead Games’ 2165.

I have to love our StarPirates gaming Community. We have weekly polls in game. Sometimes these are community referendum on major game changes, sometimes they are for feedback an idea we’re thinking of doing or have done. And sometimes things are a little sillier. We did a poll regarding the “Best Sith”. Fairly strong turn out with a somewhat surprising result. It’s not who you think…

Darth Vader : 28% [106 Votes]
Darth Maul : 7% [28 Votes]
Palpatine : 13% [47 Votes]
Count Dooku : 3% [13 Votes]
George Lucas for ruining EP 1 with Jar Jar Binks : 48% [180 Votes]

If I haven’t said it before, I love our community

It’s more than a facelift, it’s an entirely new way of playing SpyBattle. Or rather, as we call it now 2165: SpyBattle.

We’ve jumped from the Beta Version of SB to drop down menus, fresh interface look, intutive menus and even automated menus. There is a easy to use tour, with rewards for learning along the way.

Tired of the old SpyBattle? Try the new Interface!

You don’t HAVE to use this interface but anyone returning from a time away, as well as new players, will be shown this one first. If you wish to change, go to Settings and then select the “Game Graphics” you prefer. If you want you can also go to Settings and “Reset Quick Start Help” to take the tour again.

We just had a great write up of Snakehead Games in the Hamilton Spectator. It’s the big but local paper we had growing up. Pretty cool for the Admins. To be sure though, the real story as always is the the amazing community that makes what we do work and worthwhile. Thanks to everyone who makes our games and days better. And yes, feel free to share the story with others
Link: http://www.thespec.com/news/business/article/553694–ferguson-brothers-living-the-virtual-dream

Hey,

So we have started with a series of videos about our players. The main idea is to bring to life the social side of the games – after all there is much more to the game community than “mere” clicking of the mouse.

The first one is a love story. It’s Princess and the Pirate.

(We know all stories take their twists and turns and update afterwards, but no we won’t be following up here.)

They take a while to get made; so expect maybe a handful over the next year. You know the characters, I’m sure, and the video director was our own Captain Athena.

We ARE looking at getting these promoted around the web. This one is up on youtube, reddit and getting some stumbles. If you have other ideas, let us know! (We’ll also look at submitting to short documentary festivals.)

Enjoy,

AAB

Hey everyone, SHG’s newest Game, Coliseum, is live on Facebook! Log into to Facebook today and click here to get started managing your Roman gladiators today!

What is Coliseum About?

You are the manager (lanista) of a group of gladiators. Your goal is to get them to increase their fighting skills until they can take on the biggest fight of their careers at the Coliseum in Rome. If they are victorious, they will be rewarded with a promotion to a Gladiator trainer (Doctores). Adding a Doctore to your Gladiator school will increase the training effectiveness for the rest of your Gladiators for that Gladiator type (ie. Doctores Retarii increases Retarius Gladiator training).

You start off with no Gladiators but with a few coins in your purse. In order to hire new Gladiators, you need to pay a fee. There will be various Gladiators available at any one time with varying prices and abilities. Your first action should be to purchase a Gladiator. The total number of Gladiators that you can control is determined by the number of beds that you have in each city. You can then command your Gladiator to train, fight or quest. Training will increase their basic skills and allow them to fight bigger opponents. Fighting will increase their experience allowing them to move up the ranks. As the manager of a winning fighter you earn money. Questing will allow them to occasionally find money, new weapons and armor to improve their fighting, and other items (potions).

As your Status grows, you will be invited to participate in fights in arenas in other cities. As cities get closer to Rome, they will generally provide larger purses and have better quests. In order to send a Gladiator to a new city, the Gladiator must have a high enough Reputation.

If the link above doesn’t work for you, this address can be cut and pasted when you are logged into Facebook: http://apps.facebook.com/coliseumconquest/

Star Pirates has been invaded by the undead! Hordes of shambling, brain-hungry pirates, infected by a mind-numbing regena-plague have taken to the spaceways, spreading the virus to the ever-decreasing members of the uninfected population. What started out as vague rumours of unethical experiments on unwilling participants quickly escalated into a full-blown epidemic following the escape of ‘Patient Zero’ from the experimental facility.

It’s impossible to give a final tally of infected (Mostly because all the staff have been turned into zombies as well, and our counting skills have gone way downhill) but we estimate infection rates of active pirates at above 90%! It’s a mark of the great community that this event went off so successfully, and as always, we’re blown away by the participation, particularly by the event organizer, Talan MacGregor.

We’re also hungry for Braaaaaains!

The 24-hour zombie event came to a head with the zombies coming together to once more obliterate the standing ship yard record, taking it from 4314 to 4592, earning them a total of 4 free Notorious days from this event!

Best zombie apocalypse EVER!

New Game? Yes, it’s true. Snakehead Games will be releasing a new game early next week. It’s been in development and testing for a while.

Q: Is it part of the SHG Universe?
A: No. Well at least not even close to the same era, nor does it use nanobots.  Also the style of play is different with a higher graphics count.  It will still be casual play game though, and involve some similar mechanics.

Q: Is it a standalone game or on facebook?
A: Facebook.

Q: Is there a referral bonus? 
A: Yes, yes, 20% of sales for the first 6 months.

Q: When will we actually announce it?
A: May 2nd most likely.  It’s great, but we can’t compete with the Royal Wedding!

Greetings, Star Pirates!

Now I know that you’re all sorely tempted to break into a rousing chorus of Happy Birthday, but please hold your singing for the end.

Today, Star Pirates is older than it’s ever been, and by gum, that’s something worth celebrating. We decided to go all out this year and throw a 3-day party instead of your standard 1-day birthday bash. Mostly this was because we can’t agree on the launch date for the game, but as well, we just had so much planned, there was no way to fit it into one day.

Also it was a long weekend, and you have no idea how hard it is getting AAB to do any work on a holiday weekend.

With most of our celebrations, free Notorious is something we’re happy to give back to the community that gives us so much, and this year was much the same – except that this time we had cake! Starcrash Celebration Cake, to be precise. We at SHG feel that cake is a fantastic tradition that we can really get into. Or that we would like to get in to us. Either way, we like cake and hope you do too!

The party was topped off with balloons on the login page, a party in the Deep Belt, findable stealth gear to go along with an upcoming stealth trade-in (yes, another chance to get a CVI Stealth Drive!), a major official contest, and we may still have a couple of surprises in store during the coming week.

The past year has been a busy one, with the development launch of Ascension (our biggest and most popular update ever!), additions made to the SHG team, and some major growth spurts including the Panda fleets, and [FAM]. New faces have joined the community, and some older ones have faded away, but we remain astounded and gratified at the number of ‘old-timers’ who’ve stuck around with Star Pirates on the long term. You’ve been here through good and not-so-good times, through thick and thin.

It’s been said a lot, but it bears restating: The community is the best part of Star Pirates, and all of you players together make up the community. Thanks for being a part of the game, making it the great place it can be, and here’s to many more years of fun!

And that’s it! Okay, all together now… Haaaaaappy Birthday tooo yoooou…

Did you miss gettig free Special Agent Days in SpyBattle 2165?  Well now you can get ‘em again!  And yes, we are using quality surveys, not email grabbing spam ones.  (There is a big difference in quality between Snakehead Games and our competitors.)

What is the Deal?
We have partnered with Ampario, to allow players to earn Special Agent Days again. This is a company related to Ipsos and so the surveys are supposed to be very similar but there are differences.

There are a few differences between the Ampario surveys and old Ipsos surveys:

Instant Payouts
This is a big benefit to the new process. Once a survey is complete, our server is notified automatically and the reward processed. No more waiting for us to get a report and hand everything out manually.

No registration required for Ampario.
This is good and bad. You must still qualify for each survey by having to answer questions. The bad is that this is determined on a survey by survey basis (although they do use cookies to save you from having to re-enter ALL of your info).

No e-mail notifications
Since you don’t register, the only way to find out if there are surveys for you is to go to the survey page and check for them.

For now we’re hoping that some of you may want to try the new surveys out and provide us with your feedback in the discussion thread. Based on your feedback, we’ll either continue the surveys and port it over to Star Pirates or continue searching for a new company to partner with.

How to do a survey:

You can access surveys from the City menu under the ‘Misc’ heading. Click on Earn Special Agent Days
This will open a new screen where you simply have to answer the questions. There is a fairly accurate progress bar on each page.

Each successfully completed survey will award one week of Special Agent days added to your current balance of SA days. Many surveys will be aimed at US citizens, but players from England, Canada, Australia and the USA may attempt to complete the surveys.
Thank you for participating. Snakehead games gets very small recompense for this, but we are fully aware of the popularity of surveys in the past. We do want to give you a way to earn days if you cannot afford to pay for them.

Special note: Only Spy Battle players can take surveys. Later Star Pirates will be able to do the same after we try it out. Once that occurs you will be able to complete surveys in either game to earn days. No need to choose!