I was lead game designer on Parks Unleashed, the world's first adventure video game played inside of YouTube.
From Mashable:
Zyrtec worked with ad agency JWT in New York to launch the YouTube game Parks Unleashed on Sept. 5, the start of the fall allergy season. Modeled on 30 year-old text-based games like Zork, the game presented users with various scenarios in which they'd have to make a choice.
The premise was that dogs have buried Samsung Galaxy Tabs all over the park and you, the user, have to find them. As the user ambles through the park, she is confronted by various characters, like the chatty hot dog man, who asks, “What can I do you for?” At that point the onscreen choices include “Seen a pug?” “Hot dog, please” and “Diamonds??" Each choice will set you on a different path.
"We looked at every aspect of the traditional brand channel experience — beyond the videos, we looked at the various interfaces and page layout — and integrated them into a comprehensive meta-game inspired by those old-school graphic adventure PC games of the early '90s," says Josh Shabtai, experience design director at JWT. "Making a Grim Fandango that my mom would want to play might have been on my mind throughout the initial development stages."
It turns out that there are a lot of moms who want to play GrimFandango, or at least the GF-inspired game that Zyrtec came up with. The Zyrtec YouTube Channel now has 2.2 million total views, almost all of which were drawn by the game — an impressive feat over a roughly six-week period.
In addition, the "time spent" metrics were also impressive. Tim Nolan, creative director of JWT in New York, says the average player spent more than seven minutes playing the game. Some returning players were on for 30 minutes or more.
"We took this approach to talk to our consumers using media that they already engage in, at a destination they spend their time, leveraging behaviors we know they love," Nolan says.
Of course, Zyrtec didn't leave it to consumers to discover the game for themselves. The brand ran an online ad campaign promoting the game that included a YouTube masthead ad, a Yahoo Mail takeover and Facebook display ads, among other methods of outreach. The brand also tagged a TV spot with a prompt to visit YouTube.com/Zyrtec, but that campaign only ran for about a week and a half.