Paris 2024 Run: Gamification of an Olympic Bid
How Gameloft succeeded at delivering a clear and concise message through a branded minigame for the Paris 2024 Olympic bid.
Gameloft has been a major player in the mobile gaming business since its creation in 1999. When Gameloft started creating original advertisements, it only made sense to develop games as a part of its advertising business.
Today branded minigames represent a core part of the Gameloft Advertising Solutions offer and are developed by Beyond Digital, Gameloft’s in-house creative agency based in Vietnam.
Beyond Digital is more than used to developing unique minigames for well-known brands, but Paris 2024 Run represented a shift from creating something for a business to creating something for an Olympic candidature instead.
The journey began with an idea of a community sharing not only the experience of Paris 2024 on their electronic devices, but also the desire to have the Olympic Games come to Paris.
Gameloft took on the challenge and began work on what would become Paris 2024 Run, a minigame that presented the key components of the bid while also giving players a fun and unique way to engage and interact with the Olympic bid itself.
Every success has its motivation and every journey has its first step.
Paris 2024 Run took its first steps as an idea way back in the mid-2010s. The Rio Olympics had Gameloft thinking about how to create a minigame that would work as an advertising solution for the Olympics.
The project shifted styles a few times during its early development and at one time was going to be a landscape orientation game with an isometric view. In the end the side-view portrait orientation style was developed as a departure from most in-house Gameloft games and a way to ensure that the game would be accessible with just one finger.
“We targeted something casual and simple, that could be played in our games but also easily on mobile browsers. Hence why we went for a portrait oriented gameplay and a one finger experience..”
— Quentin Moreau-Defarges, Beyond Digital Production Manager
The minigame would not have been a success if it were not a fun and engaging game independent of the masterful integration of the Paris 2024 brand. The mechanics of the game had to be comfortable and never frustrating to really engage people and immerse them in Paris.
The uniqueness of Paris 2024 outside of the general romantic views of Paris was also very important for the success of the minigame. Players needed to be aware that they weren’t just playing a well-made endless runner, but a Paris 2024 endless runner.
Real Olympic Athletes
To help keep that branding in everyone’s head, the French competitive spirit starts as soon as the game loads with images of the Paris 2024 logo and Parisian monuments. The game continues to push its French style by allowing you to choose between two famous French Olympic athletes before you start running.
There was a need to use athletes who were already involved with the Olympic bid, but Gameloft wanted to go behind that and ensure that strong personalities were represented in the game. Both athletes also had to be symbols of how France is ready to take on the Olympic spirit, and the last requirement was representation of the Paralympics, highlighting how Paris 2024 includes both the Olympics and the Paralympics.
With those goals in mind there were two obvious choices, Teddy Riner and Marie-Amélie Le Fur.
Teddy Riner may seem like an odd choice for a game focused on running, but instead of seeing that as an issue, Gameloft adapted the game to the two athletes relative strengths.
The fact that Teddy Rinner is not a track and field athlete is represented in how he can not sprint for as long as Marie-Amélie Le Dur. In order to keep the game balanced, Teddy Rinner is given more endurance in the form of extra health that represents his strengths as a martial artist.
Beyond Gameloft Games
It was important for Paris 2024 Run to be accessible to as many people as possible and engage as many people as possible. By choosing Gameloft, the Olympic Committee knew they could successfully target the massive mobile market.
Paris 2024 Run is not just a game, it’s a message.
Paris 2024 Run was integrated into Gameloft games assuring that the millions of users who play Gameloft games would interact with the message of the Olympic bid.
A big part of ensuring the maximum impact for Paris 2024 Run was making it accessible to as many devices as possible. Gameloft needed to create two versions of the minigame:
- an in-app experience for integration in Gameloft games
- a browser experience that could be used all over the internet
For the team that created the minigame, the browser experience had the benefit of having fewer constraints than the in-app version.
“ Within our games, our ads are usually limited to 30 seconds to keep the player’s experience as smooth and intense as possible. We think about the browser versions differently, and usually request our teams to go all out in terms of graphics, as well as making the gameplay experience endless and competitive with the integration of leaderboards and social sharing features.”
— Quentin Moreau-Defarges, Beyond Digital Production Manager
Collective Leaderboard
Paris 2024 Run also takes an innovative approach to combining the inherently competitive nature of gaming with the softer Olympic values of participation and working together.
The in-game score can either work to motivate players to beat their high scores or place higher on the leaderboards, but it also adds to the global community score.
The dual scoring system maintains important Olympic values:
- Good sportsmanship
- Interconnectedness
- Competition
“ The Olympics are about overcoming your limits and competing with others, but also about helping each other and group participation. So through this simple idea of summing up all distances ran by every participant in the game we managed to reconcile the ideas.”
— Quentin Moreau-Defarges, Beyond Digital Production Manager
No matter if you were trying to beat your personal best or add to the community total, everyone could have fun with the minigame. Even if people only played it once, they had a positive association with the Paris 2024 brand and were prepared for the 2024 Olympic Games to come to Paris.
The minigame quickly spread across the world and on social media and in the end Paris 2024 Run reached millions of people during its 5 month campaign. Through Gameloft’s own community and a creative use of marketing, the app was able to communicate the Paris 2024 message to an incredibly large audience that would have otherwise been inaccessible.
At the end of the campaign players logged an incredible 6,674 hours into Paris 2024 Run. That’s 278 days of playtime and more importantly for Paris 2024, interaction with the Olympic bid.
With Paris receiving the 2024 Olympic Games, the innovative minigame developed by Beyond Digital seems to have made an impact. Giving people an engaging platform to experience an idea with their own hands will always beat out more abstract forms of communication.
The accessibility of the game also led to it becoming as international as the Olympic Games with positive reactions on social media coming from all corners of the globe. Everyone enjoyed experiencing Paris and more importantly, Paris 2024.
Paris 2024 Run also shows Gameloft’s ability to innovate on the cutting edge platform that is branded minigames. Beyond Digital, the creative branch of Gameloft Advertising Solutions, was able to develop a clear and engaging message for the Olympic Committee and successfully show the adaptability of the branded minigame format.
Paris winning the 2024 Olympic Games bid is an accomplishment for Paris 2024 Run and an incredible journey from a simple concept to a successful campaign for Gameloft.
Make sure you read Quentin Moreau-Defarges’ interview as well:
