When we launched Sea Hero Quest, scientists had no idea what healthy navigation performance looked like.

It was so important to understand, because it’s one of the first things to decline in Alzheimer’s dementia.

By discovering what healthy looks like, we learned something incredible: We can, at an individual level, track navigational performance against our massive benchmark data — revealing a 15 year advantage over the gold standard tests performed in memory clinics.

This isn’t hyperbole, it’s taken from the 29 scientific papers published across dementia, spatial navigation and cognition — all using Sea Hero Quest data to make sense of the findings: we have a whole listing on our papers page if you want to dive deeper.

It’s bonkers.

A LAB IN YOUR POCKET

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A LAB IN YOUR POCKET 🧬

As part of this journey, we created a private version of Sea Hero Quest called Research Edition. This version was designed in conjunction with Alzheimer’s Research UK to help researchers run cohort studies and dig deeper into the data, while also validating how well gameplay could flag early cognitive changes.

Now, we’re doing something really exciting.

We’re taking all the powerful learnings of the Research Edition and bringing the logic into a single experience, in a move that will give everyone access to the latest research tools - from individuals to researchers and clinical labs.

Early intervention is just a pipe-dream unless we can move the conversation much earlier, into the normal everyday lives of people around the globe: People who don’t yet have any signs of dementia.

Sea Hero Quest is the future of cognitive testing at scale. The best thing is, you don’t need any special equipment. Just the smartphone you already have in your pocket.

We like to think of it as a powerful lab you can call on at anytime, whenever the moment suits you, whenever you need to know how you’re doing.

JOIN THE WAITLIST

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JOIN THE WAITLIST 📋

Thousands of you have already joined our waitlist before we told anyone about it: thank you.

You’ve asked:

• 🧭 “Can I play again?”

• 📊 “Will I get a score?”

• 🧠 “Is my data still helping research?”

Yes. Yes. And absolutely yes.

We’re relaunching Sea Hero Quest with new features that not only support cutting-edge research but also, put you as the individual into focus.

• You’ll play Quests over time, some will be familiar levels, whilst others will be new.

• If you choose to support our work, you’ll receive a trackable brain score - showing how your spatial skills compare to millions of others, and how it’s changing over time.

• The core game - and the ability to contribute to research - will always be a core focus of Sea Hero Quest: so you can expect us to add lots of ways to do more over time.

This is just the beginning of a massive step-change in cognitive testing at scale.

What’s Next?

We’ll soon begin inviting waitlist members to try the Sea Hero Quest beta and answer a short questionnaire about your experience.

If you’re already signed up, you’ll be the first to know.

If not, now’s the perfect time to join:

👉 Join the Waitlist

Thank you for helping us move from raising awareness to making action.

Sea Hero Quest — Let’s end dementia, before it begins!

We’re currently raising investment around this groundbreaking project, if you’re interested in a demo, or seeing the latest pitch materials, please get in contact with us at info@fbbyqediy.xyz

Sea Hero Quest was initiated by Deutsche Telekom.

EDGE WINNERS

EDGE WINNERS

Winning EDGE not only provides vital funding to accelerate the next phase of Sea Hero Quest, our award-winning mobile game for early Alzheimer’s detection, it also connects us with a thriving network of Scottish entrepreneurs and mentors.

This achievement wouldn’t have been possible without our incredible team: Caspar, David, Paula, and Seph, along with the wider Sea Hero Quest research team, including Professor Hugo Spiers (UCL) and Dr. Antoine Courtrot (CNRS), whose scientific guidance continues to be central to our work.

Special thanks to Craig Early and David Middleton, whose support through the Scottish Enterprise Innovation Academy helped sharpen our pitch and vision. And a big shoutout to Ryan Mile at Johnston Carmichael, who joined us at our new office the day before the final to put our plans through their paces - tough love at its finest.

RECENT HIGHLIGHTS

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RECENT HIGHLIGHTS ⚓️

🇯🇵 SHQ in japan

In April, Max travelled to Japan as part of a TechScaler delegation to present Sea Hero Quest on the international stage.

With Japan’s rapidly aging population, it’s a prime setting for exploring the role of early cognitive tools in public health.

The trip was packed with inspiring conversations, new collaborations, and a renewed sense of urgency for what we’re building.

🧭 Charting Our Return with the Innovation Academy

As part of the Scottish Enterprise Innovation Academy, we developed a clear commercialisation roadmap to relaunch Sea Hero Quest to the public.

We’re now laying the groundwork for that return — and it’s going to be big.

🧠 Recognition

We were thrilled to see Sea Hero Quest featured in Die Wissenschaft as a promising early detection method for Alzheimer’s.

With over 4.3 million players contributing to the world’s largest dataset on spatial navigation, we’re building one of the most precise early intervention tools — and it’s exciting to see that potential recognised.

📣 Stay UPDATED

Follow us on LinkedIn to keep up with the journey, new research, product updates, behind-the-scenes moments, and the countdown to relaunch.

It’s powerful to have the Sea Hero Quest data, game and dashboard all under 1 roof at GLITCHERS.

We’re really excited to keep up momentum on new developments and share those with you as they’re happening — so here’s the latest progress that we can share.

To revolutionise the process for earlier assessment of Alzheimer’s dementia there are 2 major features we are asked for time and time again:

• Visualised Outcome Measure: a way to see how an individual person is performing in Sea Hero Quest with an easy readout score.

• Repeat Testing: longitudinal testing over time — a great way to catch small changes that would be impossible to spot without follow-up testing.

That’s exactly what we’re working on with Sea Hero Quest Clinical — an upgraded version of the Sea Hero Quest app for Participants and our data workbench: Celest — giving clinicians a quick performance read out score.

200+ Projects

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200+ Projects ⚓

All of these features come together at a critical point, after running 200+ research projects on the existing Research platform, in partnership with Alzheimer’s Research UK.

The logical next step: a completely new approach to engaging patient populations over time and creating the measurable opportunity for earlier intervention that’s so desperately needed.

Sea Hero Quest is a language light spatial navigation assessment with good retest effects available in 19 languages — to the Participant: it looks like a game, to the Clinicians: it’s a head start.

We’re building the technology required to bring Sea Hero Quest to as many people as possible. If you’re a potential partner interested in building the earliest possible intervention for Alzheimer’s dementia you should get involved.

Find your role in restoring a degraded landscape — will you take on the persona of an Arborist, focusing on planting and nurturing the most trees, or will you embrace the life of an Agriculturalist, expanding farmland to feed the future?

There are 7 persona’s per map to unlock — but beware, the ecosystem is delicate: every tile you change has ripple effects, much like in real-world ecosystems. Keep a close eye on disease and unexpected consequences in this simplified environmental scenario, where every decision shapes the land’s future.

Your MOVE

Data captured from player choice’s in the game will be available for analysis to help empower researchers at the University of Stirling’s Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences. This data will provide valuable insights into the factors influencing how we approach ecosystem restoration in degraded environments.

Through your gameplay, you’ll contribute to groundbreaking research that could shape the future of environmental recovery efforts.

No download or signup required — Restore is compatible with modern browsers like Chrome, Safari and can be played on desktop or mobile. Just visit the itch page to start playing.

How will you shape the world around you?

🐔

How will you shape the world around you? 🐔

Restore is part of an academic research project called RestoreID (HORIZON-CL6-2023-BIODIV-01-17). This research project investigates the relationship between nature restoration, biodiversity, and disease prevention. RestoreID is an EU funded project, and the restore game is funded through the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Horizon Europe guarantee scheme. The restore game is led by Dr Brad Duthie and Prof Nils Bunnefeld at the University of Stirling. The game will take between 5-20 minutes to play, depending on the level that you select. Only your in-game decisions will be recorded for research purposes, and no personal identifiable data will be recorded.

Find out more about the Restore ID project on the official website.

GLITCHERS has been busy working in the background to consolidate the Sea Hero Quest trademarks, IP, app, data and dashboard under 1 roof to better serve the research community and to explore the commercial possibilities of Sea Hero Quest as a screening tool for dementia and as a novel cognitive test.

With the blessing of the original project collaborators; Deutsche Telekom, Alzheimer’s Research UK, UCL and UEA we are almost ready to open back up to new projects.

Whilst the transition is taking place we are receiving a lot of email communication about the future of Sea Hero Quest — I would advise you to join the newsletter to stay abreast of all the changes:

SHQ RESEARCH EDITION

Researcher access will improve — we have radically improved current database speeds and are working towards w/c 4th November 2024 to bring new projects online, running on GLITCHERS servers.

Commercial opportunities are now possible with Sea Hero Quest — reach out to us to find out more. Screening for Alzheimer’s dementia and other areas of dementia are possible with the normative benchmark of 4.3 million players.

We are open to feedback and are visiting CTAD Madrid for in-person meetings next week — reach out to book an in person meeting.

We are also hosting remote Q&A events which you can RSVP to through Eventbrite. Spaces are limited, we will be sending out registration details through the newsletter over the coming weeks.

Urgent Call for Response…

1. Do you have any data to show that performance of SHQ in correlation with TAU biomarkers?

2. Do you have data to show moderate AD patients are all able to perform SHQ without encountering ceiling or floor effects?

If this is you or a colleague, please contact GLITCHERS directly.

Hello!

September 2024 marks the 11th year GLITCHERS has been a company. I thought about this on the GLITCHERS 10th birthday last year, that I am the only person in the company that’s been here since the beginning — since 2013.

On our 10th birthday party I made a speech and I realised I was so wrapped up in the hard parts of the story — the parts where GLITCHERS was formed out of the ashes of a mental health event.

The parts that are hard to say out loud.

When I think about now and the team, what am I asking the GLITCHERS team to celebrate? It’s hard to relate to — It’s very personal to me. It definitely feels like a big achievement to reach this milestone personally, but what’s an achievement if you can’t share it?

A party of 1 isn’t a party

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A party of 1 isn’t a party —

It’s taken this long to learn what it means to make games for good, who they are for and what kind of impact they can have.

I still don’t see many companies at the intersection of games and other industries. I think a lot of examples fail to take into account the complexity of designing and building games, and also the difficulty of mapping those playful experiences to industries outside of games. Let alone getting people to play them after all that work is thrust into the world.

What we have built at GLITCHERS is completely different to other games teams out there. That’s because we are a collection of like-minded people who are astutely aware of the difficulty of making games, but see their raw untapped power as a massive positive — available to be crafted way beyond their current application — not as a thesis, but in practical, tangible ways.

When I look at our team, I see a new vision for the company I started in 2013 — a team that has rallied around an idea that’s taken us 11 years to get this far. Through thick and thin. It’s right here, right now, at the start of a new journey — one that we are sharing together.

Instead of forging ahead with a bigger number, celebrating 11 years, I want to consider this day as the first day for all of us as a team.

A RESET TO ZERO

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A RESET TO ZERO —

An incredible team with a world changing mentality to building games. All the energy of a startup, but each with a unique experience we each bring from making games, technology, writing and creating.

The story of GLITCHERS is no longer my story alone, it’s the story of all of us, together.

On that note, I would like to welcome Caspar, David, Paula, Roland, Rebecca and Seph on this journey with me — this is TEAM GLITCHERS as of September 2024.

Ten years ago, in September 2013, two major things happened: I started GLITCHERS, a game development company, and around the same time, my brother, who I had made games with up until that point, was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.

Celebrating ten years has been bittersweet. On the one hand, it’s a celebration. On the other, it’s a painful reminder of where I came from and the ongoing issues stifling progress in mental health.

I had to reconcile my career in game development up to that point with a growing understanding of serious mental health issues. A question was swimming around in my head:

How could I possibly create games simply for entertainment now knowing how little we understood about how the brain works?

I decided that GLITCHERS would create games that could make a positive impact on the world. At first, I didn’t exactly know how.

The past decade has been a long and winding road in terms of learning how to create meaningful play and I believe the approach we have settled on is tremendous. It has been incredibly gratifying to build a team dedicated to creating games for good and then see our impact on the world around us.

We still get to create games, but we only do so with the knowledge that we are contributing to something larger than entertainment alone.

Over the last decade, we have learned how to make the most of game collaborations with experts outside of the gaming industry to tackle some of the world's most pressing issues. By combining our efforts, we can genuinely solve some of these issues - all with video games!

This year we started pre-production on Forest Guardians, our first project dedicated to rainforest protection. The chance to bring a real forest into gamers’ living rooms is an incredible feeling. What we build with Forest Guardians will be a blueprint for future conservation efforts.

Secondly, we kicked off Enhance, yet another tight collaboration with UCL that’s poised to be the spiritual successor to Sea Hero Quest, this time targeted at the 60-80 year old audience Sea Hero Quest couldn’t quite reach. More on that in 2024.

I could go on and on about what we’re up to next; about how we’re not just breaking new ground, but redefining what games are. Sometimes I feel like we’re in an alternative galaxy. We’re doing things with games that most people wouldn’t even think of. It all comes to life through our collaborations with some of the smartest and most empathetic experts we could ever hope for.

I might not be able to build another game with my brother after his diagnosis, but if there is a chance, I hope we would dream up new projects with this renewed purpose. Until then, I’m doing everything I can to demystify the human brain and protect the planet we live on. My hope is that others and people like me will join GLITCHERS in a similar mission; to use the power of games to save the world, a little bit at a time.

We’re super pleased to announce that Sea Hero Quest is back! This new Research Edition is aimed at large cohort research projects and for the first time, will put an incredibly valuable tool in the hands of new researchers worldwide in conjunction with a backend system to manage the captured data between researchers.

Sea Hero Quest is a mobile game designed to help researchers to understand the mental process of 3D navigation, which is one of the first skills lost in dementia.

The plot of the game involves a sea journey taken by a son in a quest to recover the memories his father has lost to dementia.

There are three sections: navigation, shooting flares to test orientation, and chasing creatures. Each has been carefully crafted to be as fun and exciting as it is scientifically valid.

Since its launch, Sea Hero Quest has been played for a combined total of over 117 years by 4.3 million players around the world. This amount of data would have taken over 176 centuries to collect by traditional laboratory methods.

Thanks to the continued long term support of the project, the Research Edition has returned to the Apple App Store and Google Play stores to expand on this impressive data set and allow further studies of cognition and spatial navigation for a wider range of disease types.

WHO’S INVOLVED?

We’ve partnered with our long term collaborators at Alzheimer’s Research UK, the University College London, the University of East Anglia and BoldLight to build this milestone version of the Sea Hero Quest game — this new version is designed to live well into the future and builds on the award winning project so far.

We’re so proud to see Sea Hero Quest back in researcher’s hands with all these additional features and a power up that should make it easier for new people to get involved. The aim of the project is to provide researchers with a controllable and easy way to administer digital cognitive assessment of navigation ability from wherever they are in the world.

In this Research Edition of Sea Hero Quest, players can explore a selected playlist of game levels to help scientists collect exactly what data they need from their test groups. The gameplay closely matches the original version so the huge database built by the original game can be compared against there’s also a simplified user interface for handling data collected from the game giving research scientists more time to look at data and less time building navigational tests.

DO YOU HAVE A PROJECT THAT COULD BENEFIT FROM SEA HERO QUEST’S PROVEN TRACK RECORD?

If you’re a researcher and you’re interesting in using Sea Hero Quest Research Edition, applications are open and it’s free to apply — Apply to run a project with Sea Hero Quest Research Edition through ARUK.

Originally published at on our previous blog site that’s now forever archived on October 12, 2021.

It’s been 2 weeks since we last updated our studio blog and in that time we’ve been super hard at work behind the scenes with some exciting new things that we can’t wait to share! Read on to find out what’s what at GLITCHERS HQ.

NEW OFFICE, WHO DIS?

Earlier this month we moved into a brand new studio in Leith, Edinburgh. If you want to send snacks (kidding! Unless..? 👀), we can now be found at our new HQ in the Clockwise Offices on Commercial Street. It’s been a lot of fun meeting the Clockwise team and we feel very welcomed!

Here’s Max showing off our newest (and greenest) addition to the office. What should we name her? Let us know by DM on Twitter.

GLITCHERS in the media

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SCOTTISH GAMES NETWORK PODCAST

Earlier this year Max caught up with Seb from the Scottish Games Network to chat all things video games. You can catch up and watch the episode live here.

“We’ve got another brilliant archive interview for you this week with Maxwell Scott-Slade, the director of the BAFTA-nominated, Edinburgh-based developer Glitchers. The conversation was conducted by Sebastian McKay of The Scottish Business Podcast and follows his similarly enlightening chats with Marc Williamson from Tag and Colin Mcdonald from Rivet Games that we’ve previously featured on SGN.”

THE WAY WE PLAY

We’re one of the 6 games featured in a brand new documentary: The Way We Play which you can watch now over on Instagram. Episode 3: Sea Hero Quest goes live next Tuesday, on May 26th.

Don’t forget to like and follow The Way We Play on Instagram to support them and keep up to date with their future documentaries.

BEYOND GAMES

Last but not least, last week we had the pleasure of attending Beyond Games 21 and met some awesome people in the mobile and console video game sector.

WHAT’S NEXT?

Right now we’re focusing on some exciting projects. One of which is an update to our game Nestlums, and the other is Season 2 of Drive Buy which is going to be bigger and better than ever! And finally your chance to download the epic skin you, our community.

If you want to be kept up to date with all the GLITCHERS news and take part in shaping our future, support us today!

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Originally published at on our previous blog site that’s now forever archived on May 19, 2021.