Noodle On Noodle
- Brand
- Cup Noodles
- Year
- 2009
- Objective
- Awareness
- Industry
- Food & Drink
- Mechanic
- Puzzle
- Platform
- Web
- Agency
- Razorfish
- With
- Ideaman’s
- With
- Livedoor
- With
- Metaphor
- With
- Dentsu
Objective
Cup Noodle wanted a reason for its Japanese audience to keep coming back, day after day, around the brand's core promise about dreams — turning a single 10.7cm noodle cup into a unit of shared ambition. The idea was to make an individual contribution look small and pointless on its own, so the payoff only showed up once thousands of people kept adding to the same goal.
Solution
The player registers for an ID and password, logs in, and lands at the very top of a tower of Cup Noodle cups that everyone is building together, viewed from a Google Earth-like zoomed-out angle. A holder at the bottom of the screen holds cups; the player grabs one and drags it up to set it precisely on the lid of the last cup placed. Miss the spot and the cup tumbles all the way back down to the ground, uncounted. Other players are visible at the same time — their cursors, their names, and the cup each one is currently holding — so the tower visibly grows from everyone's moves at once. A slider lets the player pull back from the top to see how high the tower has climbed so far, while a personal counter keeps a running tally of the cups they've placed themselves; stacking 100 or more unlocked a blog part and an entry into a drawing for a real 10-serving Cup Noodle Tower set. A later iPhone/iPod touch app carried the same tower over with a 100-cup daily cap and a player leaderboard.
Results
By April 18, 2009, the collectively built tower had reached a height of more than 350 km, using 3.35 million virtual Cup Noodle cups.
- 1
The player registers a username on on.cupnoodle.jp and receives an ID and password to return to the same score later.
- 2
The game opens on a shared, ever-growing tower of Cup Noodle cups, viewed from a Google Earth-like perspective, and shows other logged-in players building it live: their cursors, usernames, and the cup each is currently holding appear directly on screen.
- 3
The core action is a single drag: the player picks a cup from a holder stocked at the bottom of the screen and drags it up to the top of the tower, aiming for a precise spot on the topmost cup's lid; a missed placement drops the cup all the way to the ground and earns nothing.
- 4
Each successful placement redraws the tower a little taller and advances the running total.
- 5
A slider lets the player pull back from the top to survey the entire tower and gauge its current height.
- 6
The player's personal cup count is displayed alongside a leaderboard ranking all contributors.
- 7
Play is capped at 100 cups placed per day, and reaching 100 or more under one ID unlocks a special blog badge and eligibility to enter a drawing for a real miniature CUP NOODLE TOWER, a 10-serving set.
