Attention all you Harry Potter fans! Last month we announced the launch of the new ‘Pottermore’ site ~ an interactive website developed by J.K. Rowling and Sony based on the Harry Potter books. Well, today is the last day for you to submit your e-mail for a chance to be one of the million people who will have access to the site before it goes live to the public in October.
Tomorrow, in honor of Harry’s birthday, the site will be sending out a challenge. The first million people who complete the challenge will be given the privilege to play the beta version of the site and help put in the final touches. So far, there’s no word yet about what the challenge will be, but if it’s anything like the online scavenger hunt Rowling used to find the website last month then you know it will be a fun experience!
More details about the site were revealed on the ‘Pottermore Insider’, the ‘Pottermore’ site’s official blog. Currently, the free site will be available in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish with the hopes of adding Japanese and Korean later in the year. While there will be simple games you can play, the site will be very much about the books. Readers will experience Harry’s stories in a fresh and innovative approach as well as discover new material from J.K. Rowling that was not included in the books and were written exclusively for the ‘Pottermore’ site. For example, Rowling reveals that a young Professor McGonagall once loved a Muggle as a young woman. There are about 18,000 words of backstory that was added for the first book with more to come as each of the seven books is added to the site.’ Pottermore’ is not designed to be an online mulit-player role-playing game like World of Warcraft or a social network game like Farmville. As J.K. Rowling puts it, “(Pottermore) is an interactive, illustrated companion to the books… where (the) stories could live on and where readers could explore them in a new way.”
You can get a sneak peak of some of the website pages below courtesy of Pottermore’s twitter page. So for those of you who have or are going to submit your e-mail for the chance to enter Pottermore early…good luck! The challenge will begin 12pm UK time, which is 4am Pacific. Here is a time converter to help you find out what time it will begin in your area.
UPDATE: 11:40pm EST
Thank you to two our readers (Cyprusspud and Blahbot90) who posted a screenshot and link with new information. We have an updated Pottermore post with the latest info.
Also, as you see in the post above, it initially was said on the official Pottermore Twitter account that the challenge would start 12 noon UK time, but now according to their official blog which was updated not too long ago, they state they won’t be telling when the clues will be given. That Twitter post with the starting time has since been removed.
