World Golf Tour, an online golf experience, announced its partnership with Kiawah Island Golf Resort, located in Charleston, S.C. This venture brings the top-rated course to the Internet, making it available for play by anyone, anywhere for the first time ever.
As the recent host of the Senior PGA Championship and the 2012 host of the PGA Championship, Kiawah Island challenges the world’s best golfers. Designed by Pete Dye, it was recently ranked the No. 1 golf resort in the U.S. by Travel+Leisure Golf.
World Golf Tour is set to recreate Kiawah Island Golf Resort online, employing helicopters and professional photographers to capture extensive high-definition footage. World Golf Tour will then merge the photos with its patent-pending physics simulation engine to bring the images to life, providing players with an immersive, engaging online golfing experience.
"We at Kiawah Island Golf Resort are very excited to work with the World Golf Tour and to be able to provide a virtual Ocean Course experience to a worldwide audience on the internet via the World Golf Tour HD technology,” said Brian Gerard, Kiawah Director of Golf. “The Ocean Course has a long and distinguished tournament history, hosting the 1991 Ryder Cup Matches and this year's Senior PGA Championship. In 2012, this challenging layout will be the site of the 94th PGA Championship. We look forward to giving a taste of our great resort, the challenging Ocean Course and its new clubhouse to a global audience via this revolutionary alliance with WGT."
World Golf Tour recently debuted its Beta version, which offers a glimpse of the full product. The complete version is expected to launch in 2008 and will feature a multi-player gaming experience on Kiawah Island and other elite courses worldwide.
“World Golf Tour’s mission is to share the joy of golf with a broader audience,” said Chad Nelson, President of World Golf Tour. “Kiawah offers one of the toughest courses in the U.S., and we are honored to be chosen to bring such a respected resort to the Web. Additionally, we hope accessibility to the course online will aid in lowering scores of players that visit the land-based course and enhance their experience.”
In addition to recreating courses for competitive play and sponsored tournaments, World Golf Tour will feature in-depth information about the resorts in the game, as well as provide direct links to tee time reservation systems and resort booking sites.
The complete World Golf Tour experience will offer numerous monetization opportunities for partners and sponsors alike. Currently, World Golf Tour is working with some of the top names in golf, such as PGA.com, TaylorMade and adidas Golf, to showcase their products within the online experience.