DreamWorks and Microsoft are unveiling a dragon-themed exploration game today that uses real-world data such as maps, traffic, weather, and time of day. In DreamWorks Dragon Adventure World Explorer, the developers have layered a fantasy world on top of the real world using sophisticated location and mapping technology. They’re targeting the app at children who play games on smartphones and tablets while their parents are taking them on a road trip.
Pete Mauro of Microsoft.
The experience reskins an actual location in the fantasy environment of Berk, the island in DreamWorks’ How to Train Your Dragon 2 animated movie. You can explore fantasy-style landscapes — layered on a map of San Francisco — while flying around on the back of a creature like Toothless, the Night Fury dragon from the film. This kind of app is a hybrid of exploration and actual gameplay, and it is an interesting experiment that blends different mobile technologies as well as movies, games, and the real world. In that sense, the title is a new kind of mobile entertainment that could set itself apart from the million or so releases in app stores.
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Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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