Heineken Fans Have More Friends Game

for

From a campaign about friendship to a game you play together.

Heineken launched Fans Have More Friends, a global campaign platform by LePub that brings together football, Formula 1 and music. The message: being a fan is better when you share it. Heineken wanted fans to feel that for themselves, through a single mobile game built to last for years across all sponsorships and markets.

How do you make fans feel that fandom is better when it's shared?

Insight

A message about friendship is hard to get across with a commercial alone. Fans need to experience it themselves. That only works when the game mechanics tell the story: with friends, you get further.

Idea

The 'Fans Have More Friends' game: an endless runner where every friend you pick up along the way boosts your score. One game, with its own world for every passion.

Execution

We developed a Y2K-style endless runner that you play straight in your browser. Fans race to the stadium, the circuit or the festival, swipe past obstacles and high-five friends along the way. Every friend joins the run and raises the score. The game has three worlds: Downtown Champions for the Champions League, Neon Circuit Rush for Formula 1 and Synth Field for festival season. After a run, players join a crew. Matchmaking puts them on a team, crews compete on shared leaderboards, and anyone who finds an easter egg can give a teammate a booster for their next run. Everything runs from one central platform at fans.heineken.com, behind Heineken's age gate and localised for each market. South Africa went live first, with more markets following in the coming months.

At Electric Castle in Romania, we turned the runner into a motion game inside the Heineken House. Fans step onto a mat, a camera reads their movements and they steer with their whole body while a crowd gathers behind them. Anyone who finishes the run gets to spin the wheel for Heineken merchandise.