A Mobile Gaming Platform for Everybody
PROJECT: Name a new mobile gaming platform that delivers casual, competitive games for money to the masses.
SPARCADE: An invented mashup of “Spar,” to fight with an opponent in a short bout or practice session, as in boxing or the martial arts, and “arcade,” a space featuring an array of large pinball machines or video games. An arcade can also be series of arches supported by columns, piers, or pillars, either freestanding or attached to a wall to form a gallery.
BRAND POSITIONING: GSN Games (Sony Pictures Entertainment and AT&T Entertainment Group) hired us to name their new mobile gaming platform that enables players to compete for money in the games like Pac-Man, Scrabble, and Tetris directly from their mobile device.
This platform leverages the huge market for casual and mobile games, taps into the energy and enthusiasm around competitive video gaming, and delivers an experience unlike any other — a single, free-to-download destination, offering high-quality, skill-adapted versions of the biggest and most popular mobile game franchises of all time.
After exploring several brand positioning concepts, we began developing names that mapped specifically to the Engagement and Destination brand positions:
Engagement: This brand position encompass all aspects of engagement and at every skill level. All are welcome to play and compete in this space, and nobody should scared off or intimidated. The emphasis here is on friendly, co-play, and a collaborative experience.
Destination: The focus here is on names that evoke physical or metaphorical places that define the parameters of this gaming environment. This concept is all about creating a sense of place that becomes associated with the most exciting game environment, the way “Amazon” is now seen as the online shopping “destination.”
Sparcade is a wonderful name that maps strongly to these two brand positions, as it playfully evokes a positive, empowering, exciting, and immersive collaborative gaming experience and, literally, to a competitive gaming environment.