Where Are My Gamers At? An 8bit Marketing Story
IMPACT+ HQ
Haza!
Greetings fellow IMPACT+ fam!
I am hoping that today finds all of you well. I just wanted to stop by and and ask, who here is into video games?
I have been a die hard fan of gaming since the age of 8. One of my major bucket list items was to someday create my own video game.
And, I just published it on Itch.io last week!
What is really cool about this video game however, is not its present, but its past... You see the video game was a marketing campaign that I developed to sell copiers, printers and managed services for the company I used to work for.
When we became a platinum partner for Hewlett Packard, our sales rep asked me (I was both the social media manager and a full time sales rep at the time) if I had any out-of-the-box ideas for marketing campaigns.
I explained my vision for a retro 8-bit (think the original Nintendo entertainment system) video game in which the player played as a brave IT manager who was trying to save his office from evil copiers and printers who had come to life through artificial intelligence.
To simplify it, think mega man meets the movie office space.
They loved the idea and they fully funded the project! The game was aimed at IT managers, many of which are current or former video game players (at least almost all of them that I met in sales meetings had been committed gamers).
We generated several hundred SQLs through the game which had a contest built into the game play. Players who beat the game were given the opportunity to submit their email, name and company for a chance to win $500.
The winner was the IT manager of a large software company in MA. I wish this story had an epic ending as a major win...
But, to this day I do not know what happened. I generated a proposal and met with the IT manager who loved the product I was selling and said that a year from then, they would very much like to leave their incumbent vendor and come to us.
I was assured he would be in touch a couple months prior to that.
Then, six months later, I was laid of with 50% of the employee base of the company. The owner had bought a competitor.
While we gained massive market share, we lost a ton of money. I was laid off with about 20 other employees and given a great severance package and a letter of recommendation from the CEO to my next employer.
After that, I never found out how that customer ended up. Within 5 years or so, the company was sold to another business and the website and video game were taken down.
BUT, the good news is I owned the copyright to the game. After years of trying to figure out how to get the game published so that people could play it for free, I contacted a friend of mine who had started his own gaming business.
We were able to get the files from the video game studio I had partnered with as the executive producer for game and my friend helped me to upload it here where you can play it for free.
While I never closed that deal, I had the time of my life and was able to convince a fortune 500 company to finance my video game.
So, it was a success in another way.
I hope that any of you who play the game enjoy it.
And please remember to never give up on your dreams because with a little creativity and an open mind, you can find a way!
Thank you for your time in reading this post!
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