Royal Opera House and Hide and Seek looking to make opera fun with iPhone mini-game collection The Show Must Go On

A lot more is riding on the bright and breezy The Show Must Go On than first meets the eye.

With the government bending over backwards not to punish the financial sector for its wrongdoings, it’s been left to the Arts - from film to theatre - to feel the full force of the economic cutbacks.

The Royal Opera House - one of the most prestigious venues in the world - is hoping that the games industry will be one way for the organisation to weather the economic storm and bring opera to a younger audience.

So the curtain lifts on the first in what developer Hide & Seek has called “a long-term relationship” between itself and the ROH in the form of The Show Must Go On, a game that combines opera and its backstage workings with pick-up-and-play casual gameplay.

Rather than simply being a viral marketing tool, like ProtoSlice and Asphalt Audi RS 3, The Show Must Go On is a paid-for download. While it undoubtedly has a broader commercial purpose, it's purportedly been conceived very much as a game first and a marketing tool second.

Playing the role of embattled stage manager for four famous operas, your task is to stave off ‘bad luck’ by helping the other members of the crew to get ready to put on the show.

Helping them out means engaging in a short mini-game related to their field in some fashion. Assisting the costume department means matching up outfits to the various cast members as they fall from the sky, while abetting the conductor requires you to dash across the London skyline in a Canabalt-esque game, picking up sheet music that has blown away.

As you can probably guess from that last mini-game, the tone of the title is very breezy and not what you’d expect from a game about opera, with some witty cutaways to represent the particular ‘bad luck’ that has affected the show.

At the end of each game, your performers march out onto the stage to perform the opera you’ve picked, with the resulting mini-performance (and audience response) changing depending on how well you performed during the mini-games.

For instance, do badly with the props on one and you can expect the magnificant cannon to fire directly into your diva’s face, while mixing up the costumes results in the lead for Swan Lake wobbling onto the stage wearing a giant duck’s head.

Naturally, the clapping that greets such outcomes is muted.

The music during these sections is influenced by both your choice of opera and the outcome of the games. Should you fail to pick up enough of the sheet music, for instance, the final show will have to be played on a rather tacky sounding keyboard.

Get it right, however, and officially licensed recordings from EMI blast out of the headphones, with a selection of the best-loved moments of each of the four operas playing throughout the game.

Naturally, the Royal Opera House is hoping that you’ll soon find yourself humming the tunes under your breath, and has prepared a 12-track soundtrack to tie-in with the game for those who end up catching the opera bug.

As someone whose love for classical music was born entirely from playing Frontier: Elite 2 on the Amiga (its looping MIDI soundtrack of Mussorgsky and Strauss among others lodged the tunes eternally in my brain), I suspect this approach is far more effective than straightforward lecturing.

And from what we've seen The Show Must Go On doesn’t lecture. The game may be more or less important to the Royal Opera House's fate, but it doesn't show.

If you want to try out The Show Must Go On (and support the Royal Opera House) you can pick it up from the App Store now for an introductory price of 69p/99c.