ASCII Arcade
- Brand
- Braintree
- Year
- 2015
- Objective
- Engagement
- Industry
- Tech & Telecom
- Mechanic
- Arcade & Action
- Platform
- Web
- Agency
- West
- With
- UNIT9
Objective
Braintree's payments platform lives or dies on developer trust, and developers tune out ordinary ads. The campaign, built with UNIT9, needed to reach that audience where they actually spend their attention — in code — and reward the habit of poking around under the hood.
Solution
The way in wasn't a banner but the browser's View Source panel: a curious visitor digs through the page's HTML and spots a small round token linking off to a hidden arcade. Pasting that link into a new tab drops them into one of four playable ASCII games — Deployer, Algorithmoids, Incubator Invaders, and SDK Knockout — each a retro arcade parody built around a developer in-joke. Everything runs live in the browser with no install, using keyboard controls to dodge, shoot, or build your way through old-school levels. When a run ends, the player can post their score straight to Facebook or Twitter, which is how plenty of people found the arcade without ever opening a single line of code themselves.
- 1
The game hides inside real web pages — Braintree's site and other tech sites — with no visible ad or entry point announcing it.
- 2
The player right-clicks and views the page source, then scrolls through the code to spot a round token icon planted among the markup.
- 3
The player copies the token's URL and pastes it into a new browser window's address bar, using it like a coin dropped into an arcade machine.
- 4
The token loads a page on a separate arcade subdomain where a game renders entirely in ASCII characters and plays directly in the browser.
- 5
Each token unlocks one of four tech-themed spins on classic arcade genres — Deployer, Algorithmoids, Incubator Invaders, and SDK Knockout — and finding all four means hunting down every hidden token.
- 6
After a run, the player sees their score and can post it to social media, which is how many players discovered the arcade secondhand through Facebook and Twitter rather than by finding the code themselves.
