Vit.X – Cross the Ages

The brief

Team Vitality is one of Europe's biggest esports organizations, which meant the challenge wasn't explaining what an advergame is — it was living up to a fanbase that plays competitively for a living. Vit.X doesn't invent a world to put them in: it runs through the club's own ten years across a pixel-art Paris, with the timeline ticking along the bottom of the screen. At the years Vitality actually won something a trophy spawns, and catching it — you have to be quick, and still alive — tells you what happened that year. The history is a reward for playing well, not a cutscene to sit through.

Built with real-time multiplayer and a live leaderboard, it rewards the exact instinct competitive players already have: chasing a better score than the person next to them.

Results

A real reward — a promo code for the custom hummel × Team Vitality shoe. These are unique people who entered by finishing a run and registering a score; total plays were far higher: the game runs on the client’s own domain, so this counts engaged participants, not traffic. The figure combines the two leaderboard sessions the campaign ran across.

▶ Also on itch.io

The event version

Team Vitality came back for a second build of the same game, this one made for a live event at one of the club’s own venues. Same brand, same Albie, different mechanic: a run against the clock through a pixel-art racing strip, with checkpoints to reach before the time runs out. The rule is in the game’s own words — complete it as quickly as possible to score the most points.

The change of mechanic is the whole point. At a stand there is a queue, and a run that ends when you die can last thirty seconds or five minutes. A run that ends on a timer takes about the same for everybody, which is what makes it fair to the person waiting behind.