Play The Frame
- Brand
- Fortnite
- Year
- 2022
- Objective
- Engagement
- Industry
- Entertainment
- Mechanic
- Puzzle
- Platform
- In-Game
- Agency
- AKQA
Objective
Unofficial, GrandVision's youth eyewear brand, wanted to launch its first-ever eyewear collection designed with Fortnite and plant its flag with Gen Z, a generation that shops at the intersection of physical and digital. Fortnite offered a built-in audience of 350 million players, up to 30 million active daily, giving the brand a direct line to the people it needed to reach, backed by its own 4,000-store retail network across 27 countries.
Solution
Players drop into a custom Unofficial island in Fortnite Creative, landing inside a giant supply drop crate built to building scale. From there they race through an obstacle course built from oversized versions of the collection's frames, hunt down letters scattered across the map, and work through a maze, trying to clear all three challenges as fast as possible. Finishing posts a time players can share under #PlayTheFrame to climb a public leaderboard. Running alongside the island, selected streamers had a sealed, handmade crate dropped on their lawn that stayed locked until their community beat the in-game challenge live — the physical box and the virtual supply drop opened in the same instant, revealing the new glasses inside. Once the UK, French and German livestreams wrapped, the map opened to everyone so other communities could try to beat the streamers' times.
Results
1.6 million viewers watched the three livestream events on Twitch and YouTube, racking up 150,000 hours of footage watched. Players spent more than 2,000 hours on the map in total, for an average playtime of 35 minutes per session.
- 1
A streamer's community watches a real, hand-built Fortnite supply-drop crate land on their streamer's lawn, sealed shut — it cannot be opened by hand.
- 2
The streamer tells viewers the crate only opens if the community helps from inside the game, and calls them into Fortnite Creative.
- 3
Players enter the island code (5087-7005-4797) in Fortnite's island search to load the custom Unofficial map, spawning inside a giant supply drop that forms the whole level.
- 4
Inside, the team finds a virtual twin of the streamer's lawn crate and works together to crack it open by clearing three challenges in sequence.
- 5
An obstacle course has players jump and climb through oversized frame shapes modeled on the silhouettes of the Unofficial sunglasses collection.
- 6
A collection challenge has players explore the map to gather scattered letters, followed by a maze challenge where they find the exit to reach the end.
- 7
Each completed challenge cracks the virtual crate open further, and the real lawn crate opens in sync on the livestream, revealing the new Fortnite x Unofficial glasses for the streamer to show on air.
- 8
On finishing all three challenges, a player's completion time posts to the map's leaderboard and can be shared under #PlayTheFrame.
- 9
Once the streamer events end, the island stays open to any player, who can enter the code and try to beat the community's best time.
