For years, Pizza Hut was beloved for its dine-in experience including red cups, checkered tablecloths and games of Pac-Man with pizza. But as those dine-in restaurants have mostly disappeared, so too has the Hut’s standing in the category. Our challenge was to recapture that magic and reboot it for a new generation.
Our idea was to deliver the Pizza Hut experience home for millions of customers by creating an interactive augmented reality version of the classic Pac-Man game on our pizza box. With just a pizza box and your phone, the webAR experience did just that. No app. No quarters required.
With 11,260 hours played, 741 million media impressions and 10.6 million Pac-Man boxes sold, this “newstalgia” activation successfully rekindled customers’ love for Pizza Hut while establishing new connections with younger generations. A Pizza Hut box even became the top-selling game console in the world. Technically, that’s true.
The Customer Experience—
After a customer has their pizza delivered, they can use the top of their pizza box as the AR marker for activating the game. Using a QR code integrated into the design of the box, a customer points their phone at the QR code and this reveals a message to open their web browser. Upon doing this, customers are welcomed into our experience on a web landing page. They are asked to point their camera at the top of the pizza box and shown an instructional .gif that helps show how to activate the AR game.
The Maze—
Using original assets provided by Bandai Namco, a special edition pizza box was designed matching the original PAC-MAN® maze 1 to 1. This was used to model and animate a 3D version of the maze that built out of the box to come to life in AR. We animated 3D assets of PAC-MAN®, Inky, Blinky, Pinky and Clyde that were playable on top of the pizza box maze. When first activating the game from your phone, we animated the maze to build from the box so there is a visual flourish showing the transition from the physical box to the augmented world of PAC-MAN®.
The Gameplay—
The mechanic of the game replicated the original. Players can use a touch joystick on the screen to control PAC-MAN®. To give the users the best experience while playing in AR, we decided to create 3 different difficulty levels for the game for casual and hardcores gamers. We rewarded players with a Pizza Hut x PAC-MAN® leaderboard that allowed them to input their initials (just like the classic arcade game).
The Design—
The UI was designed with retro 80’s gaming in mind with a pixel art look & feel. We were given source art from Banda-Namco and used a combination between original art from the game as well as custom animated gifs.
The Tech—
To bring this project to life, we used three.js, A-Frame for the 3D rendering and the 8TH-Wall platform for the AR. The project uses Image recognition to detect and track the position of the box in real time, while three.js and A-Frame handles the physics, collisions, lightning and rendering of the 3D assets.
This was built for WebAR so that no downloads were required and there was a limited barrier to entry to play the game.
PRESS HIGHLIGHTS
