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What It Really Takes To Make Immersive Experiences featuring Michael Borys and Alex Lieu

Today’s guests are 42 Entertainment’s Michael Borys and Alex Lieu.


Topics include:

  • What it really takes to make immersive gaming experiences
  • How to use what’s new (and weird) to create successful projects
  • Enticing an audience with mystery and fearlessness
  • Deciding on the right time to go public with a project
  • How the joy of discovery generates organic publicity
  • How to balance money, fair payment, and artistic integrity in the creative world
  • The relationships between business, entrepreneurship, and art
  • What is 49 Boxes?
  • The excitement of viscerally connecting with real historical artifacts
  • Alex and Michael’s experiences working with Trent Reznor and Christopher Nolan (and how they made it happen)

Michael Borys leads the interactive design team at 42 Entertainment. He is responsible for all online, mobile and real-world puzzles, games and social activities. From scores of casual games found throughout 42E’s projects such as TRON’s ‘Space Paranoids’ and the Dark Knight’s ‘Sitting Ducks’ to amazing real life collaborative scavenger hunts like the one held in the dead of night on Alcatraz Island, Michael always strives to give the audiences new experiences in fun. From 1996 to 2000, he led various teams within the Disney Company and helped in the creation of the original Disney’s Daily Blast online. In 2000, Michael teamed up with Alex Lieu at 3pinmedia to work on major projects for Disney Imagineering and the Disney Theme parks, as well as create animations and games for television and the web.

Pushing the boundaries of traditional entertainment and social gaming while re-defining the rules of digital and real-world play, Alex Lieu serves as both Creative Director and Lead Experience Design Director for 42 Entertainment’s award-winning projects. From sending scores of Batman fans to mysterious locations where mobile phones were buried inside Joker-themed cakes, to leading players through a scary dilapidated warehouse leading to an ultra-secret Nine Inch Nails performance, Alex is constantly searching for new ways to immerse audiences and weave them into fiction. He pioneered immersive storytelling techniques that blend the digital and real to create “events” in fictional worlds that attract massive participation.

Learn more about Michael Borys:

Learn more about Alex Lieu:

Learn more about Michael Schein:

Learn more about Michael Roderick:

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