The client

Penguin Books was originally founded in the UK in 1935 by Allen Lane, who envisioned a collection of quality, attractive books affordable enough to be “bought as easily and casually as a packet of cigarettes.” Penguin Young Readers Group is the proud publisher of perennial brand franchises such as Mad Libs, The Little Engine That Could, the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys series, Peter Rabbit, Spot, the Classic Winnie the Pooh, Madeline, Alex Rider, the Rangers Apprentice, and Flower Fairies, among many others. Today, Penguin Publishing Group is the largest division of Penguin Random House, Inc. It has more than 10,000 employees worldwide, with more than 5,000 employees in North America. It publishes 70,000 digital and 15,000 print titles annually, with more than 100,000 eBooks available worldwide.

The problem

Mad Libs is a phrasal template word game where one player prompts others for a list of words to substitute for blanks in a story, before reading the – often comical or nonsensical – story aloud. The game is frequently played as a party game or as a pastime.

The game was invented in the United States and more than 125 million copies of Mad Libs books have been sold since the series was first published in 1958.

The problem is that the world is going digital, both mobile and web, but will the game be successfully upgraded to a digital mode?

The solution

Element 14 was hired by Penguin Group USA via Ivory Digital to work on the implementation of the UI and the strategy of making a robust and scalable website that could easily be maintained by Penguin Random House’s Marketing team. Some of the biggest challenges for this project involved the use of interactive animations that should behave responsively and adapt to the different viewports (mobile, tablet, and desktop).

The results

The impact of the app has been incredible both in App Store and in Google Play, with great user reviews and a rate of over 4 out of 5. Since its launch, it has had over 7 million downloads!

Both the number of downloads as well as the user rating show that we solved the stated problem: that YES it was possible to evolve the traditional game to the digital world.