Mount Kristos (2001)
A BAFTA-nominated online ‘holiday’ to a virtual Greek island where visitors can eat, shop, play, socialise and sing. A unique combination of Flash-based storytelling, community building and gameplay.
“Mount Kristos is your chance to have a holiday without ever leaving home or taking time off work, without having to cancel the milk or finding someone to feed the cats.”
On Mount Kristos you can eat, shop, sing, socialise, sunbathe, ski, ramble, gamble, and enjoy the local culture. Do all the things that you’ve always wanted to do on a holiday, without fear of recrimination, prosecution or marriage break-up. And it’s all free!
Simply tell the island proprieter (Kristos himself!) all about yourself - your loves and hates, your cravings and your allergies - and he will provide you with the holiday of a lifetime. So much fun that Kristos is certain you will stay with him forever!
Eat, shop and play as you enjoy an eight-day, 15-character online comedy drama – digitally tailored for your personal enjoyment. Make friends with other members of the audience and discover together the dark secret the lies at the heart of the island…
New friendships, stories, songs, games, new identities, secret liaisons… Mount Kristos is an immersive mix of character based comedy, Flash animation, Net audio, personalised email & SMS, forums, private messaging and premium rate phone-in to create an amazing new combined media format.
Innovative online animation & audio-driven comedy
Sophisticated audience tracking & personalisation
Online community building
Personalised email & SMS
Client: Freeserve (now Wanadoo)
September 13th, 2005 at 4:16 pm
Whatever happened to Mount Kristos and Online Caroline? I found Online Caroline again, but never got an email with a password, and I haven’t been able to locate Mount Kristos. What gives? This was so fun and wonderful!
September 22nd, 2005 at 6:58 pm
The was a problem with Caroline email which has now been fixed and we’re hoping to get Mount Kristos back online in October…
September 23rd, 2005 at 5:03 am
[…] A few years ago, after we had first created the fictional world of XPT, my brother (who’s a lot more familiar with the art world than I was then or now) alerted me to Finnish artist Alvar Gullichsen’s Bonk Business Inc. …a multiglobal industrial enterprise at the forefront of 3rd millennium technologies. The company is the world leader in fully Defunctioned Machinery, Cosmic Therapy applications, Advanced Disinformation Systems (ADS), Repacked consumer products and LBH (Localized Black Hole) technology. All this began when an anchovy fisherman’s family more than 150 years ago discovered an ancient recipe for Garum, a “mildly stimulating condiment made from the anchovy” and anchovy oil, which “greased the wheels of Nordic industry for many decades until overfishing by interlopers in the Baltic caused the Great Oil Crisis of 1883″ (all this and more from the hilariously deadpan Bonk History page). Bonk’s re-definition of R&D as Repacking and Disinformation seems like a good definition of what we’ve been doing at XPT in the last few years too. (Personally, I’ve always wanted to repackage an airline, turning air travel into something much more transformative - like Kahuna Airlines in Pynchon’s Vineland - and for a while Tim and I worked intermittently on an idea called LA Jet (La Jetée without the ‘e’s…) along those lines. Perhaps it’s time to start working on the livery again.) […]
October 11th, 2005 at 10:27 am
… and now we have.
September 27th, 2007 at 1:13 am
we can all unwiiiiiynd
October 31st, 2007 at 3:00 pm
Guess XPT is just one of the many holiday companies that go under… Such a shame as really could do with a visit to the island this year