Yaris
- Brand
- Toyota
- Year
- 2007
- Objective
- Product Launch
- Industry
- Automotive
- Mechanic
- Racing & Sports
- Platform
- In-Game
- Agency
- Backbone Entertainment
- Added
- October 2026
- 1
The player finds "Yaris" on Xbox Live Arcade for Xbox 360 and downloads it for free, keeping the copy permanently; from the menu they choose a timed single-player run across eight tracks or a two-player match, either split-screen or over Xbox Live.
- 2
The player picks one of three real Yaris body styles — a 3-door hatchback, a 4-door sedan, or a 4-door sedan S — all red by default and identical in handling.
- 3
Each race runs inside a tube-shaped track where the car drives along a concave U-shaped surface; the player steers left and right along the walls to gather coin trails, a structure similar to the bonus stages in Sonic the Hedgehog 2.
- 4
A robotic tentacle mounted on the hood — a "mechano-symbiont" — lets the player fire forward at oncoming enemies while driving.
- 5
Enemies and obstacles form an abstract bestiary drawn from Yaris advertising: fire-spitting MP3 players, flaming wheels trailing fire, flying robots, and masked luchador-style bikers, with some figures carried over from the brand's national campaign and web mobisodes.
- 6
The player dodges hazards and keeps the car's shield intact, aiming to destroy targets and reach the finish "in one piece" rather than simply survive.
- 7
Destroyed enemies drop coins, which the player collects alongside coins placed directly on the track; between races, these coins buy upgrades to the chassis, wheels, paint color, ammo capacity, and shields, as well as five tentacle weapons — laser saw, gatling laser, missile launcher, laser shotgun, and gauss cannon.
- 8
To afford upgrades, the player replays the eight tracks repeatedly; the final four levels throw noticeably more enemies at the car.
- 9
In two-player mode, cars affect each other with "auras" when driving close together: A restores both players' shields, X boosts coins dropped by enemies, B drains the opponent's shield, and Y siphons coins from the opponent.
- 10
Campaign support drove players to the game through a 15-second trailer running in banner ads on MySpace, AOL, Yahoo Games, Yugo, and MTV, plus promotion inside Xbox Live itself.
Objective
Toyota wanted the Yaris to feel like more than a car ad to the roughly seven million Xbox Live subscribers it saw as a natural match for the car's young, practical-but-fun positioning. Rather than pitch a virtual test drive, the brand's agency, Saatchi & Saatchi LA, folded the characters from Yaris's national ad campaign into a playable world, giving the car a foothold in entertainment rather than a 30-second spot. As Toyota's Kim McCullough put it, the goal was to move past traditional advertising into things that genuinely engage people.
Solution
You pick one of three real Yaris body styles and drop into a tube-shaped track, racing against the clock while a robotic tentacle mounted on the hood fires at the oddball enemies pulled straight from Yaris's ad campaign, including Mexican wrestlers and a gasoline spider. Coins collected along the way buy new paint, wheels, ammo, shields, and guns between runs, and there are eight tracks to work through solo. A two-player duel mode lets you race a friend on the same console or over Xbox Live, where nearby cars can steal from or top off each other's resources mid-race. Each run ends when you cross the finish line or run out of time, then it's back to the garage to spend your winnings before the next lap.
Results
Sources
- 21+
- years of cumulative play time
In its first three weeks the game was downloaded by hundreds of thousands of players, who logged more than 21 cumulative years of play time.
Can you still play it?
No: Yaris was free on Xbox Live Arcade for about a year and was pulled from the Xbox Live Marketplace in late 2008 when its brand licence expired, with no re-release since. Players who downloaded it in time may still have it on their console's hard drive.
