Pirates Love Daisies: Microsoft Challenges Grant Skinner to Create a HTML5 Game

Article by George Norman (Cybersecurity Editor)

on 06 Jan 2011

One of the annoying things about Internet Explorer 8 (the latest stable version of Microsoft's browser) is that unlike its competition, it does not have HTML5 support. With HTML5 becoming more and more popular, and with all the main browsers out there boasting that they offer better and better support for it, Microsoft decided to support it as well. The Redmond-based software giant added HTML5 support to IE9 Beta, which was launched to the public back in September 2010.

“Since launch, numerous websites have enhanced their web experiences by taking advantage of features in Internet Explorer 9 that help make their sites shine,” commented Internet Explorer Senior Technical Evangelist, Giorgio Sardo. “These successes gave us a great idea—we challenged Grant Skinner, the world-famous Flash guru, and his team to build an incredible game solely in HTML5. To be honest, it was a challenge not only to him, but one also intended to test the graphic capabilities of HTML5 and various browsers’ performance.”

The game Skinner came up with is Pirates Love Daisies ; it is a tower defense game that’s built entirely in HTML. The goal in the game is a fairly simple one, as is the case with all tower defense games. You control a band of pirates that, well, love daisies. It is your job to protect the daisies from getting snatched by evil sea creatures. The game looks very good and will keep you entertained for a bit.

On a personal note, I have to say that I am a big, big fan of tower defense games and Pirates Love Daisies is the among the best I’ve tried in a long time.

“We tried hard to make the game very approachable, with a short tutorial, and easy start, but also layer lots of strategy into it for the more experienced gamer. Our scoring system involves lots of trade-offs. As an example, you get points for defeating creeps and ending waves faster, but you also get points each wave for hoarding gold. You have to decide how to balance these two opposed reward systems,” said Grant Skinner.

You can play Pirates Love Daisies in Internet Explore 9 Beta, or you can play it in any other modern browser that supports HTML5, like Firefox and Chrome.



In related IE9 Beta news, Microsoft announced on the 1st of January that the browser has been downloaded more than 20 million times. This impressive number of downloads proves Microsoft “did good”. Skinner confirms this fact: “I never thought I’d say this, but Internet Explorer 9 actually looks to be a great browser. It has impressive performance, and seems to be very standards compliant. I would definitely recommend checking it out, you might be surprised.”



Latest News


Sony's 'Attack of the Blockbusters Sale' Slashes Prices in Half for a Ton of PS4 Games

17 Aug 2017

How Samsung's New T5 Compares to the Old T3 Portable SSD (Infographic)

17 Aug 2017

See all