Apache Pizza wanted something for the St Patrick's Day rush that people would actually play, not another discount buried in the same weekend of offers everyone else was running. We built a custom AR game, working with the agency In the Company of Huskies.
St Patrick's Day is the loudest weekend of the year for an Irish brand. Everyone is shouting offers at the same audience on the same day. Cutting through that meant building something worth opening for its own sake, with Apache built into the game rather than stamped on top of it — and it had to work in seconds, for someone standing in a queue with no patience for a download or a set of instructions.
What we made
A custom, branded AR game, built from scratch around a St Patrick's Day theme, with Apache front and centre rather than a logo bolted onto someone else's format. It runs as WebAR: open a link on a phone and it loads straight in the browser, no app to install and nothing to find in a store first.
The brief for the game itself was made for mobile: quick to load, easy to play, and built to be shared on the day rather than filed away and forgotten. Playful enough that someone would send it to a friend, branded enough that the friend would know exactly who sent it. There's no instructions screen. Open it and go.
How it was built
It was built from scratch rather than a re-skinned template, which is worth saying plainly, because most AR "games" that turn up around St Patrick's Day or Easter are the same handful of mechanics with a new logo dropped in each year. This one was made specifically for Apache and for the day itself, and kept deliberately light: mobile-first, quick to load over whatever connection someone in a queue happens to have, and stripped back until nothing stood between opening the link and playing.
WebAR suited a quick-service food brand better than a social filter would have. Nobody queueing for a pizza is going to hunt through an app or wait for one to install — they're going to tap a link, and either it loads in a second or they've already put the phone away. Building it to run in the browser meant the game only had to clear that one bar.
What happened
It shipped for St Patrick's Day, delivered with In the Company of Huskies: a game rather than another offer, live and playable on a phone with nothing to install first.