The Nightjar
- Brand
- Wrigley's
- Year
- 2011
- Objective
- Awareness
- Industry
- Food & Drink
- Mechanic
- Arcade & Action
- Platform
- App
- Agency
- Somethin' Else
- With
- AMV BBDO
Objective
5 Gum built its whole identity around "stimulate your senses," so for 2011 — the brand's self-declared "year of gaming" — it wanted a launch that lived up to that promise rather than just advertising it. The target was 15-24-year-olds who already spent their time in games, and the plan was a series of mobile apps built one sense at a time, opening with hearing. The bigger ambition was to prove a gum brand could invent a new form of entertainment, not just sponsor one.
Solution
Players load The Nightjar on an iPhone, put on headphones, and find themselves aboard a dying spaceship being dragged into a black hole. There's almost nothing to look at — just a pair of footstep tracks and a compass on an otherwise black screen — because the ship exists entirely in binaural 3D sound: doors grind open around you, sensors chirp, water drips somewhere below, something breathes just behind your shoulder. A guide named Dickie, voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch, talks the player through 14 chapters of the ship, calling out which way to turn — except his directions start to feel less and less trustworthy. Each session ends with either an escape or a capture, decided entirely by how well the player has listened.
Results
The original iPhone release passed 100,000 downloads.
- 1
The player wears headphones and gets no visual scene at all — the game states upfront that every object's position and distance is conveyed only by the direction and volume of binaural 3D sound.
- 2
Movement runs on a minimal interface: two vertical tracks at the bottom are tapped alternately to walk, with faster alternation increasing speed, while swiping a compass at the top turns the character and rotates the whole sound field with them; a triple tap opens a menu, and retry resets the player to a fixed starting orientation.
- 3
The setup: the player survives a crash aboard the powerless ship Nightjar as it spirals toward a black hole, and a voice named Dickie (Benedict Cumberbatch) offers to guide them to a rescue ship, though the story leaves it unclear how far that guidance can be trusted.
- 4
An opening chapter isolates the core skill, having the player track a single sound source — a beeping door — across empty space to reach it.
- 5
Later chapters extend this into longer traversals, following corridors and turns toward pinging sensors and exits, while hazards such as an unmarked drop-off announce themselves only through the sound of a fall, which restarts the chapter.
- 6
Stealth becomes the recurring challenge once aliens appear: the player locates and skirts around sleeping or roaming creatures, slows their tapping to soften footsteps, avoids give-away noises like splashing water, and — once spotted — speeds up to flee or descend fast enough to escape a chase, all while still homing in on sensors and exits by ear.
- 7
One stretch adds a stationary hazard, a pulsing dark-matter leak identified purely by its throbbing sound, which the player has to route around since contact is fatal.
- 8
Other objectives layer in short equipment and interaction beats — finding a spacesuit, burning alien eggs with a torch, or undoing three restraints around a sleeping creature — each cued by its own distinct sound while the creature's position stays audible throughout.
- 9
The game closes on a single unsignaled choice: the player decides whether to head for the escape hatch or toward one last sensor, and that decision — in effect, whether to trust Dickie — determines which ending plays out.
- 10
Any mistake, such as falling, touching an alien, or entering a hazard, ends the chapter instantly and restarts it from the top; chapters run only a few minutes each, and a full playthrough takes about an hour.
