Anki Overdrive Demo | Co-Founder/President of Anki Hanns Tappeiner

We're going to set up a game right now. It's very easy. It's going to be a 2-player game, and then we will add a 3rd car, which is going to drive itself. And now we can choose what kind of game we want to play. And there are multiple different games. We have a race mode, a battle mode.

Battle mode!

OK, perfect. OK, let's do a battle. And now you can see cars are showing up on the screen. And those are the cars standing here. So the phone automatically knows which cars are close by and turned on. Now you can see here. I have this game set up here now, but I can say add an additional player. Even though there is nobody here, I'm going to add 2 as a physical player. And now this here is the commander's view. So what you're playing against is what we call virtual commanders. They all have their own personalities, so they all race in very different ways. The ones in the beginning are easier to beat than the ones later on. So pick somebody somewhere in the middle. I don't know, maybe Fuzz.

He's fun.

I'm going to pick him. He has a preferred car, but we don't have that one here, so we'll give him another one. Yep, let's pick a thermo for him. Yeah. Okay, sound. Fuzz would have picked Spectrix, but— You want to turn on the sound? Luckily, Fuzz ain't picky. Cool.

Okay.

Cool.

Okay.

And so let's see, which one was Fuzz? Thermo. So I'm going to take this guy off the road for a second because he's going to be good. And now, okay, let's give one of— who wants to play first? We need one volunteer. Okay, perfect.

Come here.

Okay.

Cool.

So you give— yeah, just take the phone. And so here's the cool thing. So in the— I told you earlier we use all this robotics and AI to develop the game over time. The best part, or one good part about that, is that when you start out, it's really easy. So in the beginning, when I click start, you don't need to do anything. So just hold the phone and don't do anything and don't worry about it.

Okay.

I'm gonna click start.

Here we go!

Yeah, just hold it. You don't need to do anything.

Yep. So then are you gonna be like doing something?

I'm not gonna do anything either. I'll show you though. Yeah, just wait. So the cars are gonna start driving. So now the cars are driving, but neither her or I are doing anything right now. And so now I'll show you a few things you can do. They're on your left side. So you see how the cars are following the road automatically. So we don't need to worry about steering right now. On your left side, you have a speed slider. If you put your thumb on that and you slide it up, you're gonna go faster. Yep, perfect. And now I'm going faster as well. And faster here is still relative. This is sort of like the start-out mode, so cars are getting a lot faster later on. Okay, so you see how the cars follow the road. Now, if you tilt your phone to the left and the right side, Yeah. You're gonna see how your car steers from the inside to the outside of the lane. But, um, It's not really full steering because the cars will follow the road automatically. So that lets everybody start out very, very quickly.

Cool.

So those are the 2 most important controls. Now I'll show you the different kind of weapons you have.

Yep.

So on your top right, you have this thing called a Pulse Carbine. I have a different one called a Vulcan Cannon. So if you push that button for a little bit and keep your finger on it, you'll start shooting.

Yep.

So if I'm in front of you— so slow down a little bit, and then I'm going to be in front of you.

Yep.

And now if you go behind me, then you can shoot at me.

Yep. Perfect. Yep.

So she just got me, and she got a point for this. And so whoever gets 5 points first wins that race. So perfect. You figured that out.

I did.

There's one additional thing I want to show you real quick. It's called the tractor beam. And both her and I have that. And by the way, all cars have different items, different weapons, and so forth. The tractor beam is— so right now I'm a little bit in front of her. So she can't shoot at me because I'm too far away. Push the tractor beam and keep your finger on it.

Okay.

So that's slowing me down and sucking me in, and now she can't shoot at me. So strategically using all those items is very easy in the beginning, but as you get better and you get more and more of those items, it becomes a lot more complex. Okay, perfect. So I'm in second place right now because I have 0 points. You have 1 point. So now since we both figured out how to do this, We're gonna add this guy. This is Fuzz driving Thermal, and he's gonna be pretty good. So, um, let's see. So he's actually slow right now and waiting for us. Let's see what, uh, what's gonna happen.

Wow.

Whoa.

There's a way.

So he just got me once.

He's a professional.

So you can see how he's trying to be behind her.

Yep. If I were to slow down, could I potentially shoot him?

Yeah, yeah, you can. Yep, you can totally shoot.

Oh no. Yeah, you want to shoot him, right?

Yeah, you definitely want to shoot him.

Yep. You can't win unless you get points.

You can also shoot at me. You should shoot at me too.

Yep.

Yeah, so in the tracks, and you can't see this—

sorry. Ah, perfect.

I don't know why, but somehow he decides not to shoot at you, which I think is very unfair.

Sexy.

Oh, okay, never mind.

He is— I'm sorry.

The question was whether there's anything in the tracks.

Yes.

So there's no electronics in the tracks at all. It is all printing technology. So, as I said earlier, each car has a camera in it, a downward-facing camera, and there are codes printed onto this track, which you and I can't see. So what looks black to you and I is infrared transparent, and the cars can see codes on the roads. And so the cars read those codes and send them back to the phone. Oh, no. The tracks get more complex.

Huh? The tracks get more complex.

Yeah, we'll show you this in a second. So the big difference between the original game, Monkey Drive, and the new version—

oh, wow.

So he just beat both of us, and this is his victory lap.

Woo! Nice.

Well done. Well done. So this was a beginner game. As you get better, the cars get much, much better. You pick different commanders. You upgrade them in different ways. They get much, much faster than they were now. And then somebody asked, can you change the— can you, I guess, modify the tracks? And the answer is yes. Or, well, the real answer is you can't yet, but in September you will. So this thing here— It's coming out in September. It's called Overdrive, and it's the second generation. And so one of the big differences between the original game and the new version of the game is that in the beginning, we had— the tracks were rollable mats. So they look like posters pretty much. And you unroll them, and you can play a race on there. And that was cool because it was very convenient. And a lot of people liked it because you just unroll a track, play a game, roll it back up, and store it somewhere.

However—

It was also probably the most limiting thing we did because a lot of people asked us for new tracks and new tracks, and we made a bunch more which you can buy, but it wasn't the same as having a modular track system. So what we— we actually tried to design a modular track system before we ever came up with the rollable tracks, but we couldn't figure out how to do it. So while we were selling Drive, our engineers worked on trying to figure out how to design a modular track system which works really well. And it was hard because we had a lot of constraints. One was, we wanted to make sure that you can build a lot of different roads out of it. Because when you buy any other, like, modular track system, when you buy a base set, you build pretty much one track, maybe two. But we wanted to make sure you can build a lot of them. So, here, out of the base set, you can build 8 different tracks. If you get one expansion set with 2 pieces in it, you're already above 20 different tracks. And if you buy a second one, then the number is already so big that we don't even— And the other one was we wanted to make sure that it's very, very quick to build those tracks and rebuild them into other configurations. Because that's, in other cases, a lot of— there's a fair amount of pain involved. And because this to us is really a video game where you pretty much every time you get to a new level— if this were any kind of racing game in a computer, every time you get to a new level, your racetrack would be different. And so we really wanted to allow people to have that same experience. But with standard modular track systems, that was not possible. So what we did is we came up— or when I say we, I really mean our engineering team. They came up with this idea of magnetic connectors. And the goal was to make it very, very quick to build roads. So the way how this works is you hold road pieces, sort of like a V, and then they just click together. So it's very, very fast to rebuild tracks and build new tracks and so forth.