Chromaroma

» see chromaroma.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

A game you could only play by living in London and holding a registered Oyster card is a game with a hard border drawn around it, and I spent its entire life on the other side of that border. Chromaroma scored your commute. It took the journey history that Transport for London already held about you and turned every tap-in into points on a leaderboard where your colleagues were also standing.

Its makers called it "location-based top trumps". Stations could be captured and held, and different routes were worth different amounts. The Barclays Cycle Hire bikes counted as well, which put the surface of the city into the game alongside the tunnels under it. The public launch was 30 November 2010, which happened to be the day snow closed Gatwick and pushed the Underground into severe delays. A game about enjoying your journey opened on one of the worst travel days of that winter.

Mudlark built it from Sheffield, designed by Toby Barnes and Matt Watkins. The money came from 4iP, which was Channel 4's innovation fund, with Screen West Midlands behind it as well. The first concept post went up on the project blog in February 2009. In 2011 the Museum of Modern Art put Chromaroma in Talk to Me, its exhibition about objects that speak to people, which is a strange and appropriate honor for a piece of software whose entire subject was the dullest hour of your day.

It never got much past ten thousand players. The site was still serving the game on 9 October 2014; four weeks later, on 4 November, the crawler could not reach any part of it. By mid-December chromaroma.com carried a farewell page: "If you've come here in search of Chromaroma, you've missed the boat / bus / train / tube / bike / tram / light railway." Underneath, it said Mudlark was working on the successor, Wend.

~ the record ~

~ the oyster problem ~

To score your travel, Chromaroma had to see your travel, and in 2010 Transport for London published nothing that would let a third party do that on your behalf. The game worked because players handed over the login to their registered Oyster account and let Chromaroma go and read the journey history itself. Everybody involved understood what that meant. It got written about at the time as a security question with a good answer nowhere in sight.

That dependency is also what made the thing fragile. A game with no formal relationship to the data source it needs is one login-page redesign away from a dead weekend, and it has no way to grow beyond the one city whose card it knows how to read. Chromaroma is a London artifact in the strictest sense: the design does not survive being moved.

~ the last stop ~

Wend never shipped. Mudlark's blog runs out in January 2015, a couple of months after the game went quiet, and the studio wound down from there. The domain kept changing hands after that, and in 2026 it answers with seventeen kilobytes of Indonesian online poker under a heading about the largest gambling site around, which is a long way from a leaderboard for people going to work in the rain.

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