Best known as the singer/synthesist behind the Top 5 smash hit She Blinded Me With Science and as the co-inventor of the Beatnik polyphonic ringtone engine, Thomas Dolby today announced his latest creation: The Floating City is a rich transmedia game with a living world that changes and reacts to player contributions via web browsers, social networks, smart phones and iPads. The Floating City is now open for registration {link no longer active} and gameplay commences on June 22 at 5 p.m. GMT (1 p.m. ET in the U.S.). Players from around the world will form tribes and collaborate to earn free music downloads, merchandise and concert tickets. The leading tribe will even win the right to stage a private concert at which Thomas Dolby and his band will perform his forthcoming album in its entirety. Completely free to the public, The Floating City is a casual game that hooks you into building a whole story world with your tribe as deep as you want to go. Targeted at players of all ages, diehard fans of the five-time Grammy nominated songwriter will be delighted to find that The Floating City integrates characters, places, and objects named in every one of his albums going back to the beginning of his career. The Floating City is set against a dystopian vision of the 1940s that might have existed had WWII turned out a lot differently, says Dolby. A global energy experiment went haywire, the Earth s magnetic fields have been reversed, and the planetary climate system violated. Science has betrayed us: now what must the species do to survive Survivors explore a fictional Google map, forming tribes and trading relics amidst a bizarre sea-going barter society. As they struggle to unravel the enigma that is The Floating City, players can haggle over merchandise and music downloads including brand new songs from the much anticipated CD ‘A Map of the Floating City,’ Dolby s first album in 20 years, which will be released following the climax of the game. This is a brilliant concept, said writer/economist Steven Levitt. It s a cross between Freakonomics and Burning Man, with a back-story that would have made J.G. Ballard proud.