This is an Atlantic Canadian story of rugged people braving northern oceans and hauling in huge catches of fish.

But unlike so many business stories about the fishery, this one is set in an elegant office with exposed brick and movie posters on Barrington Street in downtown Halifax.

The office is the home of Raised Media, the Halifax digital media company that has masterminded the Deadliest Catch game on Discovery Channel’s website. (Check out the trailer.)

Raised Media has quietly been winning contracts for major clients (like Pearson plc, Discovery, HarperCollins, and BlackBerry) for eight years with the goal of using absolutely cutting-edge technology to develop games or activities that speak to people as humans.

 “One aspect of what we do is we believe that if you’re part of an audience, you’re still a human being,” said president and co-founder Mike Rizkalla in an interview in the company’s boardroom. “We talk to human beings through technology.”

An interview with Rizkalla is an entertaining and edifying experience, as he regales the listener with tales about his experience as the creative director of Collideascope Digital Productions Inc., his music career in the band Bucket Truck, and the time he met the director William Friedkin. But above all, he chronicles a great success story by telling how his 12-person company from Halifax won the Deadliest Catch game contract against huge competition and delivered an almost flawless product.

Earlier this year, Rizkalla and his co-founder Andrew Wilson learned that Discovery wanted an online game to go along with its hit reality TV series Deadliest Catch, the story of valiant fishermen battling the elements to catch fish. The good news was Raised Media had worked with Discovery Channel before, so they were invited to showcase a proposal before Discovery at the South by Southwest Conference in March. The bad news was they had only two weeks to prepare the pitch.

Rizkalla and Wilson knew they would be up against huge multi-media agencies, so they went in with a “non-pitch,” stressing the human element, the interactivity, integrity and social networking involved in their work.

The good news: they won. The bad news: they had two months to deliver the game.

Discovery wanted to launch the game when the ninth season of Deadliest Catch began in late April, so Rizkalla made sure all parties agreed on all the details in the initial stages. “We define the project and get down to what’s important to the client,” he said. “It’s not a matter of throwing bodies at something. It’s a matter of understanding how to get it done.”

The result was that less than two per cent of the order had to be revised and the game launched on time.

Raised Media produced a fantasy game that ties in with the TV story so players choose their teams of fishermen and win if their team lands the biggest catch. They can play against people they know on social networks, and Discovery awards weekly prizes to top players.

The game now has 50,000 registered users. The average visit lasts seven minutes, far longer than the industry average.

 “Deadliest Catch fans are among the most passionate, and the fantasy game is bringing them even closer to the action and deepening their engagement with Discovery,” Jason Robey, digital executive producer, Discovery Channel, said in an email. “With more than 50,000 registered users and average visit times of seven minutes, the fans have clearly spoken.”

With the Deadliest Catch game, Raised Media has scored a massive win to add to its long line of successful commissions. Rizkalla said the company is now at a crossroads. Most immediately, it is looking for about three developers, including a front-end developer. But in the longer term, the company wants to morph from designing projects for clients to developing its own products.

Rizkalla is coy about what exactly the proprietary product will look like, but he did say Raised Media will remain a tight group of highly focused people.

“We’ve worked with companies with 200 people and that’s not for me,” he said. “Our company is going to get better and better as a small company.”