The Pie's The Limit
- Brand
- Ubisoft
- Year
- 2011
- Objective
- Engagement
- Industry
- Entertainment
- Mechanic
- Arcade & Action
- Platform
- Web
- Agency
- Diplomatic-Cover
Objective
To mark Ubisoft's 25th anniversary, the studio wanted fans to celebrate in a playful way rather than a promotional one — a reason to spend time with the brand over the December holidays, with prizes drawn from Ubisoft's 2011 Christmas game lineup. The map format doubled as a showcase of the company's global reach, letting players discover the Ubisoft studio nearest to them, and it also served as an internal rallying point for staff at those studios.
Solution
Players pick a Raving Rabbid dressed as a hero from an Ubisoft franchise — Assassin's Creed, Prince of Persia, Just Dance and others — and land at one of Ubisoft's real-world studios on a Google Maps globe. There's no sign-up: play starts the moment a character is chosen. Each turn is a three-step lob — set position, angle and power — to fire a cream pie as far as possible, with distance clocked in real kilometres. Every throw sticks to a shared world map, so the community's shots pile up into one giant pie-covered planet. A session ends with the score saved to a leaderboard and shareable on Facebook or Twitter, and the top score wins prizes from Ubisoft's holiday game lineup.
Results
More than 180,000 games played and over 100,000 unique players in the first month after launch, with roughly 5,000 combined Facebook likes and nearly 1,000 shares across Ubisoft's game pages.
- 1
The player opens the mini-game on Ubisoft's 25th-anniversary site, 25years.ubi.com. No sign-up is required; a profile is created automatically and play begins immediately.
- 2
The player picks a character from a roster of Raving Rabbids dressed as heroes from Ubisoft franchises such as Assassin's Creed, Prince of Persia, and Just Dance.
- 3
The player chooses a launch site from real Ubisoft studios and offices marked on a world map.
- 4
The core action is a cannon shot: the player sets the direction the cake will fly, adjusts the launch angle to shape its arc, and charges a power meter before firing.
- 5
The cake lands at an actual location on a Google Maps globe, and the game reports the throw's real-world distance based on that geographic data.
- 6
The landing spot joins a shared world map of every player's throws, showing how much of the globe the community has covered with cake so far.
- 7
The result is saved to the player's profile, which shows their ranking on a leaderboard; players can replay to try to improve their score.
- 8
Players can share their result directly to Facebook or Twitter from within the game.
- 9
The top-ranked player on the leaderboard wins a prize of three Ubisoft titles from the 2011 holiday lineup: Rayman Origins, Assassin's Creed Revelations, and Just Dance 3.
