The Game
View the case- Brand
- Travel Oregon
- Year
- 2017
- Objective
- Awareness
- Industry
- Travel & Hospitality
- Mechanic
- Adventure & Quest
- Platform
- Web
- Agency
- Wieden + Kennedy
Objective
Travel Oregon needed to drive bookings during winter, its slowest season for tourism, and used the state's 175th Oregon Trail anniversary as a hook to get people planning trips. The goal was to put all seven of Oregon's travel regions in front of travelers, not just the state's best-known destinations, and turn browsing into an actual winter itinerary.
Solution
Players open the game in-browser at TravelOregon.com and pick a modern-day traveler — yoga instructor, winemaker, fishing guide, surfer — before stocking up supplies for the road. From there they steer a station wagon around a loop of Oregon's seven regions, choosing their own starting point, and hit a stream of pixel-art mini-games and text events along the way: skating, snowshoeing, hunting steelhead, truffle foraging, wine tasting. Instead of dying of dysentery, a run can end in a comic mishap — soggy socks, a kombucha overdose, motion sickness — commemorated with a shareable tombstone. Each session closes by pointing the player toward planning a real winter trip around the state.
Results
The game drew about 500,000 players within a few months of its October 26, 2017 launch.
- 1
The game opens directly in the browser on the Travel Oregon site, rendered in the 8-bit visual style of the original Oregon Trail — no download or install required.
- 2
Players pick a modern Oregon persona to travel as — yoga instructor, apple farmer, ski instructor, rancher, fishing guide, winemaker, surfer — and choose which of the state's seven tourism regions to start from.
- 3
Before departure, players spend a starting budget on supplies from a shop stocked with wry regional goods: artisanal coffee, craft beer, kombucha, tire chains, newspapers, dry socks, a spare tire, gas cans, a phone charger.
- 4
The core loop is a road trip: a station wagon stands in for the ox-drawn wagon, looping through Eastern Oregon, Southern Oregon, Portland, the Coast, Mount Hood and the Columbia Gorge, the Willamette Valley, and Central Oregon, with pixel-art scenery changing per region; stops along the way offer more items to buy, from snack mix and sequined skates to jerky, a fishing hat, pinot gris, and ibuprofen for wine hangovers.
- 5
Players monitor party condition and supplies throughout the trip — dry socks keep morale up, and poor management triggers setbacks such as a fine for hunting without a license.
- 6
At points along the route, players can talk to local characters who recommend real Oregon places to visit, folding tourism information into the fiction.
- 7
Regional stops trigger themed mini-games and challenges: a ten-question wine-knowledge quiz after being mistaken for a sommelier in the Willamette Valley, a truffle hunt at Silver Falls, an ID-checking challenge on a Portland brewery tour, and winter activities across the state — skiing races, snowshoeing, ice skating, cross-country skiing, snowman building, steelhead fishing, T-shirt tossing at a hockey game, and mountain biking in the Gorge.
- 8
Between stops, random events replace the original's diseases with lighter mishaps — food comas, wet socks, kombucha overload, car sickness — alongside occasional absurd encounters like a duel with a ghost.
- 9
If the character dies, the player receives a personalized tombstone with an editable, shareable epitaph.
- 10
The game closes by pivoting from fiction to reality, prompting players to book an actual winter trip to Oregon.
