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ESA launch lasts seventy-two hours. A game lasts thirty months.
There’s a date on the calendar: presaves, a video, the posting plan. Then the record drops, the weekend passes, and the algorithm turns the page. A post gets scrolled, an ad stops when the budget does, a video gets watched once. The only part of a launch an audience comes back to is something to do: a game built on the record. The industry calls it an advergame. Fans just call it the band’s game.
Free, no-obligation estimate — takes about 2 minutes.
From the record to the game
You bring the music, the artwork and the album’s world; we build an arcade game around it — one that’s over in a coffee break and gets reopened to beat a score. No templates with a logo dropped on top: the mechanics are chosen to match the record’s identity.
For SABATON, who write about real military history, that became an endless runner across a First World War battlefield — trenches, barbed wire, silhouettes on the horizon, and a mechanic lifted from the battle itself: you hit the barrels to flood the field, the way the ground by the Yser was flooded in 1914 to stop the advance. For Beast In Black, who live on the 1980s, a side-scrolling beat ’em up through neon Tokyo. And nothing is timed to the music: we don’t make rhythm games. We make the game that record would have had if it had shipped to an arcade.
The game runs in the browser, phones included, nothing to install, and it lives on your domain. On top of it sit the leaderboard and the contests tied to the release, with real prizes, signed by the artist: the album, the merch.
How long it stays alive
30 months
Race to the Sea — SABATON, for The War to End All Wars. The leaderboard is still taking scores two and a half years after release: 2,212 people so far, 322 of them in the last year alone.
6,209 entries
Jungle Ops — ¥ellow Bucks. Five races in five weeks, the leaderboard wiped each Monday. Every one of those entries is a person who finished a run and registered a score.
The Angry Video Game Nerd
One Night in Tokyo — Beast In Black. A games critic talking about the game, unprompted, on the band’s own channel. That is not something a media budget can buy.
A word on what those numbers are, because it changes how they read. They aren’t plays and they aren’t visits: they’re unique people who finished a run and typed their name in for the contest. Total plays are far higher, but the game runs on the band’s own domain and we don’t count them. That figure is the floor, not the ceiling — and we’d rather show you the floor.
The rest is the kind of thing no campaign can buy. James Rolfe — the Angry Video Game Nerd — sat down for a roundtable with Beast In Black, published on the band’s own channel, with the game among the topics. His words: “It looks very authentic. It looks just like an old school beat ’em up… And it’s hilarious. I love it.” And: “Iron Maiden had games and you guys got a game. I think it’s such a great idea.” When Jungle 2 came out, ¥ellow Bucks announced his game himself, on his own TikTok: try it, the top five win, first place gets the cap he wore on the cover. A musician does not put an ad in his own feed. And One Night in Tokyo has a leaderboard of its own: 462 players, thirty months on, 73 of them still playing this year. For Italy there’s FantaSanremo Adventure: a platformer racing through Riviera streets to the Ariston stage.
And the judgement we trust most isn’t a number at all: Nuclear Blast has now done this with three of their bands. SABATON, Beast In Black, and Beyond The Black — whose Reincarnation was built for a single, not an album. A label that commissions the same thing three times has made the argument on this page better than we can.
What we need from you
Not much, and that’s deliberate: a launch has enough plates spinning already. We need the music, the artwork, the story the record tells, and one person who can say yes on visual identity. The rest — design, development, testing, going live — is our job. So is the kit the record goes out with: the cartridge, the key visual, the posts and the video. Included every time, because a game nobody hears about is a game nobody plays. Think weeks, not days: the right moment to call is when the launch plan starts taking shape, not the week before.
Frequently asked questions
How long does it take?
Weeks, not days. If the release is less than two weeks away, the honest answer is no — better to tie the game to the next date on the calendar: the tour, an anniversary. The comfortable moment to start is when the launch plan takes shape.
Does the game have to follow the music?
No, and it’s usually better if it doesn’t. Nothing in One Night in Tokyo is timed to the songs: the mechanics follow the record’s identity, not its metronome. A rhythm game forces the player to be a musician; an arcade game lets them be a fan.
Where does it run?
In the browser, phones included, nothing to install. And it lives on your domain: the audience stays at your place, not on somebody else’s platform. SABATON’s lives at racetothesea.sabaton.net, Beast In Black’s on beastinblack.com — addresses inside their own houses.
What happens after release week?
The leaderboard keeps taking scores, and every date on the calendar — the tour, the vinyl, the anniversary — is a chance to run a new contest on the same game. It can also be reset on a rhythm: for ¥ellow Bucks we wiped it every week — five races in five weeks, and every week a fresh reason to come back.
Who owns the player data?
You do. The game runs on your domain and contest entries belong to the campaign owner; we’re the technical supplier. All of it GDPR-compliant.
Is there a date on the calendar?
Tell us about the record: the date, the world around it, what needs to happen. A quote costs nothing, and the hard part — working out which game that record is — is the part we enjoy most.
More solutions: Custom Advergame · White-Label for Agencies · Gamification for Lead Generation · Trade Show Games