Verizon wanted in on the valuable gaming market, but gamers don't take kindly to pretenders. Our task was to announce that the famously hard-to-find Xbox was now available at Verizon stores. There was no discount, no exclusive offer. We needed pure, authentic hype to get people to care. 

Our idea: A live-action in-real-life video game with streamer AverageJonas navigating custom levels we build to reference classic games like Minecraft, Grand Turismo, and Halo, all livestreamed on Twitch. Maybe we let viewers vote in the chat to determine his moves. And let's have him interact with some real-life NPC's — the lovably stilted non-playable characters who help players find their way through a game — before finally arriving at the treasure: an Xbox, located in a futuristic Verizon. 

There was no way it could work. Too intensive to make. Too complicated. and the audience too hard to please. Are a bunch of gamers going to praise some interloping $100B telco brand? (See below.) We had over 38K total engagements during the 75 minutes, including over 7,500 votes cast deciding AverageJonas's actions. Total viewership was 626K, making it that day's #2 most-watched Twitch stream in the U.S., #11 globally.

I came up with the concept and wrote the gameplay format, the script, and the social posts promoting it.