The David Moyes excuse generator was unveiled yesterday after United lost 3-0 to bitter rivals City, and used on both the Manchester Evening News and Liverpool Echo websites.
The game was built during a Trinity Mirror training course at the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan) where 15 journalists from across Trinity Mirror's regional sites were given two days to create digital content - focused on mobile and social audiences.
At the end of yesterday, the story had generated 557,000 page views, says Trinity Mirror.
The game invites readers to put in a situation they need an excuse for. The generator then randomly picks one of the excuses used by David Moyes to explain United’s difficult season so far.
The game was made by the MEN's mobile editor Andrew Stuart, the Echo's deputy head of content David Bartlett, Chester Chronicle's digital editor Jo Henwood and the North East's online content writer Richard Fletcher.
They worked with UCLan journalism lecturer Andy Dickinson to create the game using open source code tool Codepen.
Alison Gow, Editor, Digital Innovations at Trinity Mirror, said: “The 'Art of the Possible' session at UCLan produced some cracking ideas, of which the Moyes excuse generator is the first to go live.
“It was terrific to see the teams working on really creative, engaging content ideas, and the massive audience response to this MEN offering shows the value of play-and-learn time.
“The excuse generator led our analytics and there was a huge amount of social sharing activity plus lots of media discussion.”
The game has been picked up and linked to by the BBC Sports football gossip blog and ITV Granada.
It has even explained ‘conscious uncoupling’ following the Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin split.
The game has been tweaked to ensure it works on the responsive versions of the sites, as the team knew the majority of the game's traffic would come from social media and an early-morning mobile audience.
According to the publishers, there are now plans to tweak the game to allow an Alan Pardew version, depending on Newcastle's result against Southampton this weekend. Other managers at the wrong end of the table are also under consideration for a game…
