Isle of Man's Memory Lane Games is featured in Google Play’s 2025 global #WeArePlay campaign
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00:00We launched our app from the Isle of Man,
00:07a small island between England and Ireland.
00:10A few years ago, my friend Peter and I were sitting in our local pub,
00:14talking about our moms.
00:18We talked about what they had in common,
00:20and of course it was a love of old family photos.
00:23I thought, I wonder if we can turn those photos into games.
00:26And Peter said, actually, we're turning memories into games,
00:29and we started Memory Lane Games the next day.
00:34So we designed simple, quiz-style games that are dementia-friendly.
00:39Beautiful photos that really evoke positive memories,
00:42and simple, multiple-choice questions.
00:45If you get an answer wrong, it just gently disappears.
00:48It doesn't tell you you did anything wrong,
00:50and that is errorless learning.
00:54So our first game was on Sheffield, where Peter's mom was from,
00:57and our next game was on Vancouver, where my mom grew up.
01:00Was there something we had to fix on the Vancouver game?
01:03Oh, I've got a couple suggestions for you to add.
01:07Good. They love them, which is great.
01:09But we realized quickly, we're helping moms all over the world.
01:14So we started making more, and it blew up.
01:17What we found after running a clinical trial
01:19with our friends from the hospice in the Isle of Man
01:22is that 92% of caregivers were more relaxed
01:26while playing with someone with dementia.
01:31And 58% of the people with dementia were communicating more.
01:35Because who was that in the photo?
01:37Who was it? Groucho Marx, yes.
01:46When we started, we didn't have much of a marketing budget.
01:49And our traction really started to grow in surprising places,
01:53like the Philippines, like India.
01:56We've had 100,000 downloads in 134 countries.
02:01That was possible with Google Play.
02:04Our next big thing is leveraging Gen AI,
02:09using Google Gemini to create hyper-personalized content
02:13for every individual anywhere in the world.
02:20You know, two blokes in their late 50s,
02:22sitting in a pub, talking about their moms,
02:25and look what can happen.
02:27We think it's wonderful.
02:28A small team from the Isle of Man
02:31can create something that is making such a big difference
02:34in people's lives all over the world.
02:50Google
02:53Google