Christmas Shopper Simulator
- Brand
- GAME
- Year
- 2014
- Objective
- Sales
- Industry
- Retail
- Mechanic
- Simulation & Strategy
- Platform
- In-Game
- Agency
- 101
Objective
Every December, GAME — a specialist games retailer — has to compete for holiday attention against generalist chains with far bigger media budgets. Rather than buy more reach, the brand wanted a piece of content its core gaming audience would recognise and want to share on its own, turning earned media — streams, playthroughs, reposts — into the campaign's real distribution.
Solution
Players download and install a free PC/Mac game from a standalone site: no ad, just a game to run. It drops you into a shopping mall from a third-person view with a Christmas gift list and a countdown timer, and the challenge is to grab everything on the list before time runs out. Getting there is the fun part — the mall's physics are deliberately unstable, so shelves topple, displays scatter and shoppers go flying as you barrel through, in the same knowingly broken style as Goat Simulator. A run ends when the timer hits zero or the list is cleared, leaving players with a chaotic highlight reel practically built for a screen-recording and a YouTube upload — which is exactly what happened.
Results
Over 1 million downloads and 36 million YouTube views (dandad.org).
- 1
The player downloads the game free from its promo site for PC or Mac, no registration required, then picks a shopper character — male or female, with no further customization.
- 2
Play unfolds in a shopping mall shown from third-person over the character's shoulder, populated with other shoppers and connected by working floors and escalators.
- 3
Missions come from payphones scattered through the mall rather than a menu: picking up a phone triggers a call naming the gift to buy and the store that carries it.
- 4
The player heads to the named store — each a parody of a real UK retail brand — hunts the unmarked item among the shelves, clears a store-specific obstacle to reach it, and fights off competing NPC shoppers by jumping, shoving, and grabbing before carrying the prize to Santa's grotto to complete the mission.
- 5
Missions run on a countdown timer, and finishing one sends the player back to a payphone for the next, with later calls raising both the difficulty of the search and the competition for the item.
- 6
Outside of missions the mall doubles as a sandbox with deliberately broken physics: players can throw gifts, ride escalators, smash displays, climb onto high shelving, and dive into crowds purely for chaos.
- 7
A dedicated fart button shakes and scatters nearby merchandise — a purely comedic effect with no bearing on any mission.
- 8
The game tracks a set of absurd achievements, from finding a hidden homeless character to splitting into the splits via a physics glitch, giving players a reason to keep poking around the mall.
- 9
Beyond the mission chain, daily challenges give players a reason to come back to the mall every day through the holiday season.
- 10
The campaign extended offline: limited physical copies of the game were hidden in real GAME stores, and whoever found one won an exclusive in-store prize.
