Microsoft is teaming up with Lionsgate this week to promote The Hunger Games. Due to hit theatres on Friday, The Hunger Games tells the tale of a post-apocalyptic world where teenagers are selected from districts of Panem (where North America once existed) to compete in a battle of survival. Microsoft has partnered with Lionsgate to build a special HTML5 version of The Hunger Games. The site incorporates some of the latest HTML5 techniques to produce movie-like effects such as stream, lens flare, and video projections.

Visitors can sign-in using a Twitter or Facebook account to have their friends faces placed on banners and walls throughout the site, providing a somewhat creepy but familiar social experience. Although the site works in all modern browsers, Microsoft is hoping that its latest Internet Explorer 9 marketing effort will see fans of the movie flock to the minisite and gain access to some exclusive movie content. There are two easter egg features in the site that reveal never-before-seen clips ahead of the movie's release later this week:

• In the Control Room you can type in "ivolunteer" on your keyboard after clicking on the map section
• In the Avenue of Tributes you can click on Katniss and then Peeta to reveal a clip from the training center

For Microsoft, it's a chance to demonstrate the power of HTML5 and an opportunity to remind web users of Internet Explorer — there is even an animated IE icon in one particular section of the site. It comes shortly after Cut the Rope for IE and follows a new promotion to encourage web users to take another look at Internet Explorer "the browser you loved to hate." The Hunger Games site certainly looks impressive for an HTML5 implementation and Microsoft tells us it has at least one more HTML5 site in the making — we'll let you know as soon as it's ready to share more details on that one.