The story behind Mardi Brah on Kickstarter, brah

I’m excited to announce a new project that I’m involved with, a new iPhone game called Mardi Brah.

Mardi Brah is an iPhone game that has been entirely drawn by hand by my good friend Lionel Milton. Our team at Flatstack has been hand-coding the app, and together we’re working to launch Mardi Brah at the Super Bowl in New Orleans next month!

I wanted to share the personal story of how this project came about and our goals for Mardi Brah.

Lionel and I have been friends for 10+ years. He is literally the first person that I met in New Orleans after moving here in 2002. I had just rolled into town and we decided to head over to an art opening at Lionel’s gallery. The parties back in the day at the Elleone gallery were the perfect welcome to New Orleans, it was an awesome scene with Ed Maximillion on the turntables and lots of cool lower garden folks. I introduced myself to Lionel and we got to be friends.

Over the years, we’ve been looking for a way to collaborate. We both have tried a lot of things over the last 10 years, and whenever we hooked up, we always said: “when are we going to hook up to do something together?”

Two years ago I went to a Saints game with Lionel. I pulled out my iPhone and showed him Angry Birds.

“What if you produced an iPhone game like this using your art and street style?” I asked.

We tried a few things, thought about Launch Pad Ignition, finding a co-founder, hiring a developer.

This fall we ran an internal hackathon at Flatstack, and most of the projects our engineers chose to work on were games. They were having fun working on this stuff.

With the Super Bowl approaching, we all want to showcase New Orleans as a creative community and highlight the technology products emerging. The talk I gave at TribeCon focused on adding a technology layer to the existing creative fabric in our city.

Lionel is a great example of our natural creative talent as a visual artist, and has had a great career. We realized that building an iPhone game is simply a new medium for his art, and that is exactly what it means to tech-enable the talent we have in New Orleans.

The collaboration between Lionel & Flatstack has been a blast. Lots of funny Skype calls and a lot of hard work has gone into building the game. We’re on track to have the v1 release to the app store in time for the Super Bowl.

We’re launching the Kickstarter campaign because we need your help to launch the game. We want to license original music by Flow Tribe and Nesby Phips to include in the same. We also want to host a party during the Super Bowl. We’re launching a PR effort in conjunction with the Super Bowl tech committee to showcase the talent and collaboration and launch Mardi Brah as a brand that we can continue to build on.

My personal goals for Mardi Brah are:

• Build a game that becomes a successful iPhone app showcasing Lionel’s art

• Inspire and maybe hire other New Orleans artists and teach them Lionel’s process for turning hand-illustrations into files that developers can work with to build games

• Continue to build momentum for New Orleans and Louisiana as a digital media & gaming hub, in particular building games & products that feature our own natural talent & resources

• Launch a game that you’ll have fun playing!

It would mean a lot if you’d back the Kickstarter project for Mardi Brah, and thanks for your support!