A fundamental lesson of the game is to place torches as you explore in order to light your way home. So we began our campaign with building a larger-than-life installation of the lesson “Light Your Way Home” in iconic Minecraft typeface on a roof visible from the LAX flight path and on a live-stream feed. On the day when we’re all traveling home to our families, we brought this piece of game wisdom to life by mimicking the runway’s literal lighting of the way home.

We had players take part in a new online mini-game within Minecraft, designed to teach them this fundamental lesson. As players completed tasks in the game, each word in “Light Your Way Home” would light up within the game – and in its real-world counterpart – with the LED words lighting up one at a time.

To bring the fundamental lesson to life, we had the words “Light Your Way Home” emblazoned on a rooftop on the flight path to LAX in giant blocky Minecraft letters.

We used the game itself to light the installation. Working with Minecraft build group BlockWorks, we created a Minecraft game world that mirrored the LA rooftop installation location, along with a handful of iconic Los Angeles landmarks. Then a unique mini-game was created for each landmark. Lastly, a small group of influencers from the Minecraft community live-streamed the mini-games as they solved them one at a time. When each mini-game was completed, it illuminated a portion of the installation, with the entire installation illuminating in real life when all the mini-games were completed. The installation went live the Sunday before Thanksgiving, adding a little surprise and delight to one of the most hectic and high-trafficked travel times of the year.

The campaign successfully activated the community to engage more, share more, and play more Minecraft during the year’s peak play time. At launch, we immediately caught the community’s attention – nearly 1.5 million people viewed a recap of the installation and live-streamed event, grossing over 5 million impressions. We created a new way to play with the release of the custom mini-game; over 6,000 players downloaded and lit their way home in-game. High social metrics reaffirmed the community’s love for Minecraft. The highly engaging campaign saw over 4,000 mentions of our promoted hashtag #MinecraftIRL during this timeframe. On Twitter alone, the hashtag has received 42,743,974 impressions to date. The overall campaign garnered over 32.8 million total reach and attracted 71.5K new fans and followers on our owned Facebook and Twitter channels respectively.