Cannes Lions
WIEDEN+KENNEDY AMSTERDAM, Amsterdam / WIEDEN+KENNEDY / 2017
Overview
Entries
Credits
Description
‘Bitmap Banshees’ is a candy-coated VR thriller game set inside a future dystopian Amsterdam, where a gang of biker banshees have taken over the city and are out to get you.
To survive the cursed banshees, players must navigate the psychedelic-science-fiction-slash-B-grade-horror-frogger reality and collect ‘carroty’s’ - secret weapon collectables in the form of supernatural carrots.
The game overflows from the digital into a physical installation with players straddling a real exercise bike turned hacked Mad Max machine, which serves as the game’s interface and is completed with haptics and interactive elements like a bike bell that harbours special powers.
Wearing a modified Oculus Rift headset, players sit on the interactive bike to pedal and steer inside the game’s world and ring the bike’s bell to unleash a defending carrotty’s blast against the banshees.
Execution
IMPLEMENTATION + TIMELINE
To give Bitmap Banshees cultural relevance, we launched it just in time for Halloween.
In order to hit the calendar moment, we had less than three months from the initial brief to create the project – meaning timings were extremely tight. However, given the visual atheistic and nature of the game, we had to align with Halloween in order to leverage the cultural moment and drive scale for the launch events.
PLACEMENT + SCALE
Bitmap Banshees was first launched at an exclusive client-only event in W+K Amsterdam’s gallery space on Thursday 27 October, 2016. In addition to the Mad-Max-style bike interface and accompanying screen so those around the person playing the game could see what they were experiencing via the VR headset, the launch was accompanied by a print exhibition that took the experience from digital into physical.
A second public event followed on Friday 21October.
Outcome
REACH + ENGAGEMENT
More than 700 people attended the two launch events, including W+K client representations and people from Amsterdam’s creative and technology scene.
Bitmap Banshees stayed on exhibition in W+K’s public gallery until January 2017, with hundreds more visitors and clients enjoying the VR activation.
It was exhibited at London’s Most Contagious event, where more than 300 attendees played the game, and where it was hailed the ‘best exhibition stand’.
It garnered global attention at launch with more than 35 articles in tech and creative media outlets.
IMPACT
Bitmap Banshees firmly put the Department of New Realities on the map.
The Department has already secured several client funded VR projects, with more in the pipeline. And Bitmap Banshees’ success continues past launch, with appearances planned at several more global tech events and plans to make the game available on, Steam, later this year.
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