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TechStars Boston director Shawn Broderick is working with a new startup. This time, it’s his baby.
Broderick has been running the Boston branch of Boulder, Colo., based Techstars startup incubator program since it launched in 2009. He is continuing to work with TechStars while joining former games biz collaborator Andrea Shubert and TechStars alum Tom Monaghan on a new venture, called Play140.
Working from a small cluster of desks at Polaris Ventures’ DogPatch Labs incubator in Cambridge, the trio is building text-based social games on Twitter and SMS.
Their first, MatchUp, posts a new set of multiple-choice questions three times daily. There is no correct answer, but players try to guess which answer will receive the most hits.
The young company currently has two more games under development. The co-founders declined to discuss their next projects until they are released, but a massively multiplayer online game (MMO) over Twitter is a possibility, Shubert said.
MatchUp is free for now. Monaghan said if they succeed at attracting players, they will begin to offer premium services like persistent scores and rankings.
“We’re a bit contrarian. Everybody’s rushing toward Facebook and Flash,” Broderick said, referring to Flash-based Facebook games like Farmville. “Instead of zigging we’re zagging. We think there’s a way to serve entertainment with text.”
Shubert and Broderick worked together on an Internet game startup Broderick founded in 1996 called Genetic Anomalies. The company sold to California game software maker THQ Inc. for about $8 million in stock in 1999.
Monaghan joined TechStars Boston’s inaugural 2009 session as co-founder of online temporary staffing marketplace startup TempMine. That company is now shut down.
Before Genetic Anomalies, Shubert, who then went by the first name Anthony, designed a popular Internet relay chat word game called Acrophobia.
“Text is sexy,” Shubert said, “and everybody can read.”
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