Paper Wings Game
- Brand
- Red Bull
- Year
- 2012
- Objective
- Engagement
- Industry
- Food & Drink
- Mechanic
- Puzzle
- Platform
- Web
- Agency
- Less Rain
Objective
Red Bull built the game as a digital companion to its real-world Paper Wings paper-airplane championship, giving people who never qualified at a university heat a way to still take part in the race to the Salzburg world final. By tying a plane's progress to Twitter shares, the brand converted casual interest in the event into measurable social spread of the campaign.
Solution
The player lands on the game page and first folds their own paper plane, following creases laid out step by step on a 3D sheet of paper in the browser. Once it's folded, they launch it, and it sets off toward Salzburg, the host city of the Paper Wings world final. From there the plane sits on a shared leaderboard, and folding skill no longer matters — the only way to move it forward is to get people to retweet it, with each retweet pushing it a little closer to Salzburg and a little higher up the rankings. A session ends with the player checking where their plane now sits against everyone else's, in a race that's really a contest of who can rally the most support on Twitter.
- 1
The player opens the Red Bull Paper Wings game on redbullpaperwings.com/game, which invites them to fold a paper plane and send it toward Salzburg, host city of the Paper Wings world final.
- 2
A sheet of paper appears in a 3D view and the player folds it into a plane themselves, crease by crease, through a 3D origami interface.
- 3
The player launches the finished plane, which flies off toward Salzburg.
- 4
The launch places the plane on a shared leaderboard showing how far it has advanced toward Salzburg relative to other players' planes.
- 5
Distance is not earned through flying skill but through social promotion: the player is prompted to share the launch on Twitter, and each retweet it receives pushes the plane higher on the leaderboard and closer to Salzburg.
