In a sense, Lee Thach’s new video game Flu-Ville went viral even before it debuted on Facebook.

Thach created the computer game, which educates users on ways to stop the spread of the influenza virus, for a national contest sponsored by the Atlanta-based U.S. Centers for Disease Control.

The CDC recently named Flu-Ville the first-place winner of the contest and awarded Thach, a Perquimans County native, $15,000 in prize money.

“Our judges were looking for highly creative ideas,” Shelly Diaz, a spokeswoman for the CDC, said Tuesday. “We looked at the creativity of the app and we looked how it used the flu data we provided. We looked at the technical merit and we even considered if the app used good health communication principles. We felt Flu-Ville best met the challenges we put forward.”

For Thach, the CDC prize is the culmination of hours of hard work. Thach, a graphic artist for The Daily Advance since 2006, spent nights and weekends on the project. It took him about a month to write all the computer code for the game, he said.

On the surface, Thach’s game is similar to a popular Facebook application called Cityville. But in Flu-Ville, players build cities across the country while treating and preventing the spread of flu.

The Flu-Ville application is linked to weekly data from the CDC on the flu situation in the U.S. On Tuesday, North Carolina showed no problems, but in South Carolina there were sporadic cases so players with a city in South Carolina would need to take extra precautions.

As the real situation changes in the U.S., Flu-Ville will change too.

Players in Flu-Ville earn benefits for building places where people can wash their hands. They get more points if they inoculate residents.

But like in real life, flu strains mutate. Players must from time to time research the new strain in order to get an effective vaccination campaign.

And like in real life, people can die.

“But it’s real, real hard to do that” in Flu-Ville, Thach said. “I didn’t want to scare people.”

Thach admits he had to read up a lot on the flu in order to be educated enough to develop the game.

“The idea is to keep your people healthy,” he said. “It promotes prevention and awareness and uses real-life strategies, but not in real time. If a person gets sick, and you have 30 people in your town and (the sick person) goes and talks to somebody they can get sick and it can spread.”

Thach emphasized that Flu-Ville is an educational tool and that the CDC offers a disclaimer about its use.

“Flu-Ville is not endorsed by the CDC in any way,” Thach said. “The influenza prevention and awareness strategies employed in Flu-Ville may not accurately portray real-world influenza interventions and communications strategies employed by the CDC. I understand that. You can’t send somebody home in real life and in 10 minutes they get better.”

If you live in Thach’s Flu-Ville, you can.

Flu-Ville is not Thach’s first foray into educational video games.

Thach in fact is the developer and founder of FuelTheBrain.com, an educational games and resources website for elementary students and teachers. His wife, Jennifer, is a second-grade teacher at White Oak Elementary School in Chowan County and offers educational insight on all the games her husband develops.

“My wife and I started FuelTheBrain in 2009 and that really got me into developing educational games,” Thach said. “And then I found out about the CDC challenge from a friend.”

The contest to develop the flu game was posted on www.challenge.gov, a federal website that lists issues the government is dealing with and asks developers to help. On Tuesday, for example, the U.S. Air Force listed a $20,000 prize to develop a computer system that can determine the approximate age (adult, teen, child) and gender of small groups of people at a distance.

Before winning the $15,000 CDC prize, the only money Thach had made from FuelTheBrain.com came from the sale of advertising on the site. It costs nothing to play the FuelTheBrain games and it costs nothing to play Flu-Ville on Facebook.

For now, Flu-Ville is available on Facebook, but an application for mobile phones may be in the works. For more information about Flu-Ville, visit FuelTheBrain.com.