Dikembe Mutombo's 4 1/2 Weeks To Save The World
- Brand
- Old Spice
- Year
- 2012
- Objective
- Awareness
- Industry
- Fashion & Beauty
- Mechanic
- Adventure & Quest
- Platform
- Web
- Agency
- Powerhouse Animation
- With
- Adam Atomic
- With
- Driftlab
- With
- Wieden + Kennedy
Objective
Old Spice needed to keep its holiday-season buzz going and push its new Champion scent, building on the absurdist tone from its Terry Crews spots while giving people a reason to come back rather than just watch. It tied the campaign to the era's biggest news hook — the Mayan "end of the world" prophecy for December 21, 2012 — and made new NBA-star signee Dikembe Mutombo the face of it, moving from ad to something people could actually play.
Solution
The player lands on a title screen where the cursor is Mutombo's famous wagging finger, then steps into an 8/16-bit arcade platformer starring a pixelated Mutombo racing to stop the Mayan apocalypse. Each week unlocked one new chapter built around whatever absurd "sign of the end times" was in the news — a Korean dance craze, a bankrupt snack company, a vampire movie sequel — and every chapter runs two stages punctuated by a cutscene with sidekicks Science the Bear and a talking turkey, ending each time in a boss fight. Old Spice deodorant doubles as an in-game item: strap it on as a jetpack or throw it at enemies to clear a level. After beating a chapter, players type their initials into a classic arcade high-score entry, then share their run on Twitter or Facebook, or embed the game on their own site — and have to wait a week for the next chapter to unlock.
- 1
The player opens the campaign site to an 8-bit start screen navigated with a wagging pixel-art cursor of Mutombo's finger instead of a pointer. Choosing to play triggers an intro cutscene in which Mutombo's head lifts off to reveal a small pixel Mutombo and three companion characters, and Mutombo's own voice announces that the world must be saved.
- 2
From there the player reaches a central hub that branches into weekly chapters; only the current week's chapter is unlocked, with the rest locked until their release date, so the full game can't be completed in one sitting.
- 3
Each chapter runs two stages back to back, separated by a dialogue interlude where Mutombo banters with his sidekicks, a super-intelligent bear named Science the Bear and a turkey; the second stage always ends in a boss fight.
- 4
The mini-games change chapter to chapter, each riffing on a real news story of the week. Highlights include throwing ballots at bystanders distracted by a Korean dance craze to drive them to vote, a minecart shooter against recurring enemies called Blurgies amid a snack-cake shortage after a bakery's bankruptcy, lobbing deodorant into a lottery drum to block a movie producer's funding, and a delivery run to a pregnant English princess craving an American sandwich and soda while dodging a character called Octomama — the same chapter also drops the player into a round of Pong against Pong itself.
- 5
Throughout the game an Old Spice deodorant can doubles as a jetpack, giving the player flight as a playable ability rather than a scripted ad moment.
- 6
The final chapter switches genre entirely, becoming a bullet-hell space shooter in which the player fights through internet memes and dodges lasers to destroy the internet and cancel the apocalypse.
- 7
The game tracks a running score, but progress is binary: the player either clears a stage or dies and restarts it.
- 8
Finishing the game prompts the player to enter their initials, arcade-style, adding the result to a leaderboard.
- 9
From the end screen the player can share the game on Twitter and Facebook or grab an embed code to place it on another website or blog, since it's built as a portable widget rather than a page tied to the campaign site.
