Instead of Traditional Ads, Why Not a Video Game?

Tintri came up with the brilliant idea to revolutionize its marketing with a video game.

It’s a medium-sized company based in the Bay Area, and they’ve done most of their marketing on their website and at annual trade shows. It worked well enough, but making a big splash at trade shows is extraordinarily difficult. The competition is staggering, and the routine is always the same. A few people at a time will hang out in the booth for a while and have a couple of snacks, then move on to the next booth and forget all about Tintri.

They wanted to convince potential customers to stay longer, so they hired us here at reddbug to build a video game that’s so compelling that people would not want to leave.

We did it inside six months, but it wasn’t easy. Building a video game from scratch—including the concept and story—is a daunting experience, especially if you want to make sure the game is not only entertaining but addicting. We also had to ensure players wouldn’t feel like they’re being manipulated with an interactive ad.

And the game had to be relevant. It couldn’t just be about anything. Tintri builds sophisticated storage devices. Their enterprise cloud platform combines a web service architecture like Amazon’s with virtual machines and containers. It sounds complicated, but Tintri makes everything easy.

So we built all that in. The game consists of multiple levels and rooms. Each room represents another step in provisioning a server in such a way that’s directly related to Tintri’s product. Not only is the game entertaining, it educates players about Tintri while they’re playing it.

We also had to make sure the game didn’t infringe upon any other game maker’s intellectual property or trademark. It had to be original.

And we were under a time crunch. It’s easy enough to get a mobile app or game approved for distribution in the Android store, but it’s a different story with Apple. Apple has standards. Apple is picky. Apple likes to say no.

But they didn’t say no to reddbug and Tintri. It’s a good thing, too, because if the game wasn’t finished on time, if it was too buggy, or if the Apple store didn’t think it was good enough, all that time and money and effort would have been wasted.

It wasn’t wasted. The game was a smashing success. It really is fun and addictive, and it really does educate players about Tintri. The company even put up big TVs in their trade show booth displaying the leaderboards. It drew massive crowds. Thousands of people downloaded it onto their mobile devices and played it. They competed against each other. They talked about it. They brought more and more people into the booth who lingered and immersed themselves in Tintri’s world for a long time.

It was a risky move, but Tintri more than made its money back on the investment.

The game is still available in the app store. You can download and play it yourself for free. It’s called Storage Tintris.

And if you’d like to hire us to create an app or game for your company, contact us.