Big Lavender Game
- Brand
- Old Spice
- Year
- 2018
- Objective
- Sales
- Industry
- Fashion & Beauty
- Mechanic
- Arcade & Action
- Platform
- Web
- Agency
- Wieden + Kennedy
- With
- Monks
Objective
Old Spice (P&G) was rolling out a lavender-and-mint body wash exclusively through Walmart — a scent its young male core audience would normally dismiss as anything but masculine. The brand needed to make lavender feel fun instead of embarrassing, and to give that audience a reason to keep coming back to the product and its retailer.
Solution
Players land on a standalone site and step into a first-person shooter starring Tevin Garromondi, a retired "lavender tracker" called back for one last job. Armed with an energy blaster, they shoot drifting sprigs of lavender and mint out of the air, filling bottles of Old Spice body wash as each round progresses. Cartoon noir cutscenes break up the action between levels, sending the player from the US to Europe to Japan with detours into UFOs, aliens, and migrating swarms of mint. A bonus round has them firing at mint alone, and a closing shower scene puts the product front and center before a score screen invites another run.
- 1
Players land on a standalone site, biglavendergame.com, that opens like a first-person shooter: the pitch is to help Old Spice fill gel bottles by clearing three levels of lavender hunting.
- 2
A cartoon-noir cutscene introduces Tevin Garromondi, a retired lavender tracker pulled out of retirement for one last job sourcing ingredients for Old Spice and Walmart.
- 3
The core loop is a first-person shooting gallery: players aim a blaster-bazooka at lavender sprigs drifting through a rendered environment, and each hit sends raw material into the gel bottle. Decoy objects — cut-out phones, famous paintings, and fidget spinners — move through the same scene and must not be shot; a single wrong hit resets the player's accumulated streak to zero, pushing them to replay for a clean run.
- 4
Shooting segments alternate with animated cutscenes that advance an absurd plot (UFOs, aliens, migrating mint) and with a bonus round styled as a classic shooting gallery, where players pick off mint targets floating in the air.
- 5
The game progresses through two more locations, Europe and then Japan, each with a new rendered backdrop and a harder mix of targets and decoys than the level before.
- 6
Each location ends with a final score and a closing animation, and players are invited to replay that level to beat their result.
- 7
The story wraps in shower scenes where the collected lavender and mint land in a bottle of Old Spice gel, the product payoff for the line sold at Walmart.
