Earlier this week, BoomTown motored on down to the HQ of Booyah in downtown Palo Alto, Calif., for a chat with its CEO and co-founder, Keith Lee.
Also there: Jim Breyer, the Accel Partners moneybags who recently joined the board of the mobile social gaming start-up, forking over $20 million in new funding for the privilege.
Best known for its MyTown iPhone app, now with upward of two million users, Booyah is made up of a team of gaming industry veterans, especially from Blizzard Entertainment, which is now part of Activision Blizzard (ATVI).
Started in 2008, the company had previously raised $9 million in venture funding, mostly from the Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers $100 million iFund, as well as from DAG Ventures.
MyTown, which is about to come out with a new version, is one of the most popular and innovative location-based social games on Apple (AAPL) mobile devices.
That compares with other social check-in services, such as Foursquare (just over one million users) and Gowalla (250,000).
MyTown is slightly different from these services, though, focusing on gaming in its check-ins and virtual goods versus emphasis on a discovery element.
Lee and Breyer talk about all this and more in the video of my interview, which includes a short tour of Booyah’s Silicon Valley HQ (it is soon moving to San Francisco):