Reebok revs ARG with Lewis
By Simon Fuller. Gaming Formula. If you want your alternate reality game to stand out, it’s good to have player immersion, tough puzzles and forums going crazy for your content. Star power is great too. And that’s exactly what Reebok is bringing to the genre with Lewis Hamilton: Secret Life, an ARG starring the Formula One pilot himself.
Here’s the premise. Old Lewis isn’t just an F1 driver. It turns out he’s been leading a double life as a sort of James Bond-esque character, recovering stolen artwork and the like, and players are invited to help him out on this by completing various missions. The game begins at SecretLewis.com, with puzzles to solve and clues to gather, and continues on users’ mobile phones and via live events in a number of cities around the world (following the path of the F1 tour, of course).
So how did Reebok end up with this ARG?
“In a world where consumers are seeking ever more immersive experiences and increasingly editing out conventional push methods of advertising, brands are having to innovate,” says David Varela, the game’s producer at development outfit nDreams. “The beauty of tying a global sporting superstar into an ARG is that it enables a genuinely surprising and engaging story to be told in a way that touches a whole range of people on a whole host of different levels. The one constant is the brand message, which is carefully weaved in a truly relevant and fun way – Lewis has a secret life, a life for which he needs very specialist training and assistance.”
The ARG certainly develops on an epic scale. Running until October, Secret Life is playable in nine languages and incorporates a Twitter feed, a raft of fictional websites, along with specially filmed video footage featuring Lewis.
“We really want to reach as many people as possible,” says Varela. “That’s why… we’ve made as much of the game as possible accessible via mobile browsers, because not everyone has a computer in the countries we’re addressing – in many countries, the mobile phone is the main device for accessing the Internet.
“We’ve also made sure that the adventure needn’t be too demanding,” he adds. “Yes, people can get into it and spend hours at a time exploring, but we don’t want people to feel lost or left behind. We’re breaking the story up into episodes so that regular players can have a breather every few weeks and newcomers can come in halfway through the season and get straight into a new episode quickly and easily. We definitely want the vanguard of dedicated players to lead the way – we just make sure that the main posse of players can keep up if they just want to follow the action.”
But while the game might be set in an alternative reality, it’s built with its star in mind.
“We weren’t trying to incorporate Lewis into the game so much as creating a game that would match his life,” says Varela. “Lewis has a very glamorous, jet set lifestyle and he’s a really adventurous guy – he describes himself as an ‘extreme athlete’ and he’s a genuine adrenaline junkie. So we came up with a story that fits with what people know about his life, highlights some of the lesser known aspects of his personality, and then extends it into, well, stuff we’ve made up.”
