Blue Notes Racing

But, there is some downtime between periods. The Blues wanted to fill those breaks in the action with entertainment on the 25-foot jumbotron perched over center ice. They’d been doing this with video for decades, but wanted something fresh. Their priorities were simple: keep the energy up, and focus it on the sponsors, and make it interactive.

Our team stepped in with the technology and creative application needed to pull off an interactive game at the Blues stadium for the first time. The central challenge revolved around ensuring the game and network could receive and process thousands of client requests at once with low latency and high stability—keeping gameplay as close to real-time as possible.

To do this, we created a second screen web application backed by integrated AWS services that hosted, analyzed and processed our input data streams. This allowed us to network device experiences together so users in a crowd could manipulate a central screen.

After we established the backing infrastructure, we ideated on compelling game flows and concepts to engage fans in a way that felt entertaining and non-invasive. We landed on a zamboni racing game, which married elements of a water gun horse race you’d see at a carnival, but in the style of the 8-bit video games from the early 90s. 

Here’s how it worked: Fans scanned the QR code that appeared on the jumbotron and their phone became a video game controller. Three zambonis lined up against one another overhead on the big screen. Fans were assigned to one of three teams. When the race started, fans tapped the button on their phone as fast as they could—the more they tapped, the faster their zamboni drove. The members of the winning team won a special offer from the sponsor brand.