An example you can’t play is a screenshot. Every one on this page runs: click a cover and you’re playing. We’ve grouped them by what the brand needed, because that’s where a brief starts: not with a genre, with a job to do.
An advergame is a video game a brand commissions to do a marketing job: launch a record, activate a sponsor, send people back to a product. It’s a video game first. If it isn’t, nobody plays it and the job doesn’t get done. The ones below are ours. Six that made history are at the bottom, with their sources.
A release gets a weekend of attention, then the feed moves on. A game built on the record is the one part of the launch people reopen, because there’s a score to beat. More on this: Album Launch Games →
Client: SABATON · Endless Runner
For the album The War to End All Wars. SABATON write about real military history, so the mechanic is a real event: you hit the barrels to flood the field, the way the Yser plain was flooded in 1914 to stop the advance. You don’t watch the battle: you do the thing that won it.
30 months on, the leaderboard is still taking scores.
Client: BEAST IN BLACK · Beat 'Em Up
For a band whose whole look already runs on 80s arcade nostalgia, a beat ’em up wasn’t a gimmick: it was the most honest format on the shelf. Neon Tokyo, enemies in waves, Streets of Rage-style combat.
James Rolfe, the Angry Video Game Nerd, on the band’s own channel: “It looks very authentic. It looks just like an old school beat ’em up…”
Client: Beyond The Black · Arcade / Survival
For a single, not an album: a smaller occasion and a faster one, so the game has to be understood in seconds and finished in minutes. Which is why it’s a duel and nothing else. The witch throws her magic down from above, you parry with the sword and send it straight back at her.
The third Nuclear Blast band with a game of ours. The soundtrack is the song itself, rewritten in 8-bit by the band.
Client: ¥ellow Bucks · Shoot 'n' Run
The brief was one line: make something as loud as the music. A run-and-gun where every enemy, prop and background is built around ¥ellow Bucks himself, not stuck on top under licence. Released alongside a single.
Five races in five weeks, the leaderboard reset every week: 6,209 people finished a run and registered a score.
All four are for Team Vitality, one of Europe’s biggest esports organisations: five projects in four years, four of them on this page. The rule is the same every time. The sponsor is the prize or the playing field, never the toll gate you pay to get in. More on this: Esports Sponsor Activations →
Client: Team Vitality · Esports / Runner
Built for the fans of a club that plays for a living, so the bar was high. Ten years of the club’s history as one run through a pixel-art Paris: in the years Vitality won something a trophy spawns, and catching it tells you what happened that year. The history is a reward for playing well, not a cutscene to sit through.
The reward was real: a promo code for the custom hummel Team Vitality shoe.
Client: Team Vitality · Sport Games
An esports club asking for a sports game. Veni, vidi, vici taken literally, in four events: obstacle course, long jump, swimming, archery. One leaderboard over all four, so the fastest way to lose an afternoon is to be beaten at archery by someone who had never played it before.
Two buttons, one under each hand, for all four sports: nobody needs instructions, and it plays the same on a phone.
Client: Team Vitality × EVNIA · Esports / Skill trainer
For EVNIA, Philips’ gaming monitors, and the hard version of product placement: put the monitor in the game without turning the game into an ad. So the monitor isn’t a frame around the play area. It is the play area: every screen is drawn on an EVNIA panel, with three skill trainers behind it: reaction, aim, shooting.
Every leaderboard opens with Team Vitality’s Counter-Strike pros already at the top: they are the score to beat. Played on a computer, with mouse and keyboard.
Client: Team Vitality × Skin.Club · Esports / Activation page
Honesty first: the challenge runs as a mod inside Counter-Strike 2, and the mod isn’t ours. We built the page around it, which is the fragile part: a fan arrives from a clip, gets a personal join link, is told exactly where to paste it, and the page gets out of the way.
Sixty servers across three regions, and Skin.Club as the prize instead of the toll gate: a premium case of in-game skins, unlocked by taking part.
Here the game isn’t the destination. It’s the detour that sends the player back where the brand wanted them: into a fantasy team, into a store. More on this: Gamification for Lead Generation →
Client: FantaSanremo · Platformer
The 2025 edition. FantaSanremo is the fantasy league built on the Sanremo song festival, February’s national hobby in Italy, so the brief was never to explain the Festival: it was to build the arcade game the Festival would have had in 1985. The singers are the characters, the paparazzi are the enemies, and Gianni Morandi is holding a broom.
24 hidden trophies, unlocked by doing things on FantaSanremo itself: building your team is one of them.
Client: FantaSanremo · Platformer
The 2026 edition: a year later the client came back for a second one. No big names this time: you are a newcomer nobody knows, aiming for the Ariston — the race along the Riviera, the lost pass at the casino, paying your dues backstage, and stage fright as the final boss — in a no-download browser game timed to the one week a year the whole audience is already paying attention.
44,637 scores submitted, +64% vs. the 2025 edition.
Client: SynRed · Endless Runner
The premise is a joke: two YouTubers trapped inside an old cartridge, chased by its final boss. The mechanic underneath is a trackable path to purchase.
At 1,500 points the SynRed store unlocks inside the game.
Advergames are older than the web, and most lists of them copy each other, numbers included. These six come with a source you can click, and we kept only what that source actually says. Where the figures didn’t agree, the figure stayed out.
An arcade game sponsored by Anheuser-Busch and meant for bars, cabinet included: Budweiser on the screen, a brass footrail and drink holders on the machine. You’re the bartender. For arcades it became Root Beer Tapper: the original was seen as advertising alcohol to minors.
Source: Wikipedia
Doom with the violence taken out and every monster and level redrawn, given away on CD-ROM inside the Chex cereal box. In 2020 it came back in HD, remastered by two of its original creators, which says something about how long people kept the disc.
Source: General Mills, 18 May 2020 · Wikipedia
A PlayStation game released in Japan by KID. Pepsi’s superhero mascot runs on his own; your job is the dodging, the dashing and the jumping. An auto-runner, long before phones made the genre a habit.
Source: Wikipedia
Three games for Xbox and Xbox 360, built by Blitz Games and sold over the counter: $3.99 each with a value meal. Burger King said it moved more than two million in four weeks, and that a game usually counts as a blockbuster at one million.
Source: QSR Web, 21 December 2006
A free iPhone and iPad game released together with an animated short, both made with Moonbot Studios and CAA Marketing. Play well enough in each world and the reward was food, redeemed in the restaurants: the game as the coupon.
A browser game in 1980s graphics on Louis Vuitton’s own site, tied to Virgil Abloh’s Autumn Winter 2019 show: you run through New York dodging bins and traffic cones, collecting pieces of the monogram for points.
Source: Dezeen, 16 July 2019
What the six have in common with ours: the brand isn’t a logo on the loading screen, it’s inside the mechanic. The bartender pours the beer. The monitor is the screen you play on. The game is the coupon.
Tell us what the game has to do: launch, activate, bring people back. The quote is free and takes about two minutes. The hard part is the one we like most: working out which game your brief is.
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