It all started with a different burger. While working as Creative Director for the internet marketing agency, eVisibility, one of my biggest projects was being in charge of the creative for our client, McDonald’s. My first task was the website for their newest burger addition, Angus Third Pounders®. I designed web pages, banner ads, landing pages and coupons for this fresh new product.

Then, in a meeting we started discussing ways in which we could take this project to a new level by incorporating an online casual game into the mix. The following month saw research into the numbers to see if going this route would drive traffic to our goals and beyond, as well as work out how we would build it, if approved by the client. We worked side-by-side with Davis Elen Agency in the Pacific Northwest who had the experience and client knowledge of McDonald’s to help us communicate our goals with them and set timelines and expectations.

From our research at the time, we concluded that online casual gaming was a great viral campaign strategy, and these games reached over one hundred, forty-five million people aged twelve to sixty-five in 2007. Of that figure, over seventy-one million played casual games for one or more hours per week. The growth of the casual gaming audience, the engagement with the medium itself, and the heightened interest from advertisers had contributed to ad revenue projections approaching $400-700 million by 2010. Combining this with the fact that the strong majority of casual gamers (eighty-five percent) would prefer to play free ad-supported games than pay for downloads, and it was clear that online casual gaming is more than just a fun way to pass some time.

Our first direction for the game was going to be to design a first-person shooter-type game so Andre Couturier and I got to work on the mechanics. I had this idea come about because the guy who sat across From me in the office looked like a real life zombie and I thought it would be fun to fend off zombies by using a sling shot to launch burgers at them, feeding them in the process and keeping them at bay. Because my coworker resembled a zombie, he naturally was drawn as a character in the game, tentatively title Feed The Unfed. Then I thought it would be fun to make zombie versions of all my co-workers. This brought everyone into the game and really got coworkers into the creation.

After some back and forth between, the agencies and McDonald’s we decided not to go the shooter route and instead find another type of casual game so it was back to the drawing board. I thought of this fun bar-top game at a club where my band used to play. It was called Q-Shot and was a game similar to Bejeweled you could play on those Megatouch machines. These games are super fun and really addictive so I thought this could be a good direction for us, if we can be creative and make it our own. The game goes like this: combine three or more of a like icon, (or ingredient of a BigMac®) and you add this to the empty burger area. We all know the jingle, “Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, on a sesame seed bun.” You are limited in time so each time you create an entire burger you get more as a reward. You score points by combining ingredients, with bonus points for big combos.

The first phase of design centered around creating the game board and the game pieces. Since prizes will be awarded, we worked out the security concerns through encryption and worked on the promotional strategy. Many of the icon pieces were pretty straight forward, with exception of Special Sauce, so this one took creation of many different revisions.

To differentiate ourselves from Q-shot or Bejeweled, we added a diagonal move to the gameplay. Then we needed to figure out an option for the timer. A simple timer to me, just lacks creativity and since we have an open canvas to work on, we started putting a lot of thought into how we make this game easy enough for a novice to understand, but adding wrinkles in to the gameplay to make it challenging enough that people would play it over and over again. Working with Andre, we came up with a creative and innovative solution: let’s add a soft drink to wash these burgers down and quench your thirst as you play. This way as you construct burgers, you take sips of the drink. When you complete a burger you pour more of the beverage into your glass, but if you run out of your drink, the game ends. This new game piece allowed for cross marketing another product and added another sponsor to the game! Win-win!

As we moved through creation phases and entered the final one, it was time for making the audio. The part of every project that brings me some of the most joy. Doing voices for characters, customizing explosive sounds, recording pouring soda, slurping straws and ice in a glass. All these things really start to bring the animations to life. Just like editing is such a key importance to video, audio is equally important to everything that moves.

In just four months, Andre and I created two fully operational games, one shooter, one stacker, while also working on the graphics for their web marketing for Angus Third Pounders®. We had a happy client and were really excited to premiere our creation. So we flew to the Pacific Northwest of the US, to Portland, Oregon where we’d introduce Stack My Mac at the NBA Portland Trailblazers Streetball Jam. Along with professional NBA players, there were Star Wars Stormtroopers, full-size dinosaurs, and even Ronald McDonald trying his best to make high score on our game.

In the end, Stack My Mac was a huge success. Recorded scores on the game reached over two million, proving that players were playing over and over again to earn bragging rights and score prizes from BigMac® or Dr. Pepper® coupons to sporting event tickets. From a marketing standpoint, between our Angus Third Pounders® campaign and Stack My Mac, we exceeded our predicted numbers by over 1,000% for our client.