IFC :: Samurai Kittens

Click to View Project:

go ahead... kill some kittens

Finally, a game that rewards you for wasting time AND killing kittens.

What could be more enticing to a 18-25 year old male? Samurai Kittens was a viral micro-site/game created to increase awareness for the anime mini-series Samurai 7 on IFC. In addition to striking copy and graphics, we achieved our objective of capturing the users' attention through the following 3 strategies.

NUMBER 1

We challenged users to see who could waste the most time playing the game. The game had no "score" per se, but rather for every second you played the game, you wasted 1 second of your human life.

3 million people have played the game. 65,339 or a full 2% of all people playing the game submitted their high score. The average length of game play was 19 minutes! The top high score logged over 19 hours of game play. The top 1000 registered high scores all logged over 1 hour of game play.

NUMBER 2

To attract the widest possible audience we drastically dumbed down game play. This was not a game for "gamers" requiring complex combinations of buttons and movements. By randomly pressing up/down left/right anyone could play and achieve the game's 2nd goal: unlocking and viewing the 9 animated kitten death sequences called "FURTALITIES".

(Below are 4 cheat codes so you can quickly view 4 of the 9 furtalities. From the main game screen, enter any of the words in the "Secret Codes" field.)

Nobuseri
Katsushiro
Ukyo
Gorobei

Number 3

We didn't slap the user upside his head with advertising; the messaging was subtly integrated into the very fabric of the game. For example, after your first death a "corporate fat cat" makes you watch a 15 second trailer of the TV show. The cheat codes are character names from the TV series and the Samurai Kittens video intro and logo is identical to the TV show's logo and intro. This manner of deftly weaving the message into the site is absolutely critical to be perceived as "legitimate" by this highly savvy audience.

RESULTS

Over 3 million people have played our crazy kitten death game. 65,339 people entered their high scores with an average 19 minutes spent playing the game!

All of this was achieved by a single ad banner. No TV, no print, nothing but really good content that went viral. A quick review of 3rd party site traffic analysis tools like Alexa or Media Metrix shows that our site received as much traffic as incredible national campaigns with massive budgets like FollowTheFinger.com

Samurai Kittens achieved cult status with nothing else than a banner ad on IFC, compelling content, and word of mouth. Samurai Kittens was a perfect example of true organic, not manufactured growth.