Node Gaming Centre

The Client: The Node

Description: A LAN (Local Area Network) Gaming Centre. Basically, it’s a café where customers can enjoy one another’s company, a biscuit and a refreshing drink while they shoot up strangers on the internet via first person shooter games. They offer other games, but they didn’t fit in with the previous sentence as well.

Our Heroics: If you’re not sure what to do with all the extra time you have while launching a company? How about starting an Alternate Reality Game (known on the web, and to players as an ARG).

While developing the look, feel and overall brand of Node Gaming we were also put in charge of designing an advertisement for the local youth newspaper - create buzz for the opening of this cool LAN Gaming Centre. Our challenge was to target high school students before summer was out, our only chance was to get into the youth magazine for June. One problem with that - the Node did not have a physical location yet, it was up to us to come up with a way to advertise something that wasn’t there.

Our creative team came up with the idea to have a contest or game whereby players of the game would work through weekly challenges to ultimately find the Node’s location. The client loved the idea and embraced it with open arms.

What happened next was unexpected and started us on a whole new learning experience. The ad that we ran in the paper was scanned and included in a blog by someone - it didn’t take long to gain international attention. The ARG was born.

We launched a series of 8 challenges through the ARG with limited success locally, but with a lot of buzz on the web. The final challenge had 24 winners which came from Mumbai, London, New York and various points in between. You can check out some of the elements of the ARG NODE ARG

The ARG aside, we created some of the most compelling graphic elements for The Node including a Pacman and Mrs. Pacman sign for the bathroom (game inspired), the front windows of the location features a 7 foot high Galaga ship, the logo and colours as well as various other components including the web site were all very well received and look awesome.

QUOTABLE

“Working with Tim and John was a blast. They are very passionate about games and have built a great business.”

-Kevin Franco