PETA Foundation - Holiday Snowball Fight

Animal rights campaigners PETA wanted a simple, tongue-in-cheek Christmas game that involved throwing snowballs at PETA enemies in order to spread the message behind their ongoing campaign.

The game concept would be in similar style to their previous game ‘Revenge of the PETA tomatoes’, and the game would be broadly targeting 18-30 year olds who actively engage in social networking sites and have an interest in online Flash games.

The game was to be released in early December 2008, giving it the chance to spread virally amongst PETA’s audience in the run-up to Christmas.

Although PETA wanted to create a light-hearted game that users would want to play and pass on, they also wanted the game to be gruesome to shock and disgust the player into realising that the PETA enemies have committed acts of animal cruelty and should receive their comeuppance.

MCM Net built a 4-level game called the ‘PETA Holiday Snowball Fight’ featuring well-known PETA enemies such as Madonna, Donna Karan, Mary-Kate and Ashley the ‘Trollsen Twins’ and Sarah Palin as targets amongst others. The aim of the game is to throw snowballs at the PETA enemies and avoid innocent civilians in order to progress to the next level. Each PETA enemy holds a specific number of points, and the player has to obtain a minimum number of points per level in order to progress to the next, with each level becoming increasingly harder to complete.

Each level has its own introductory text to inform the player who to hit and who to avoid, and the characters' appearances are exaggerated in order for players to easily identify the celebrity for comical value.

The game play is very simple, consisting of a simple point and click method where users aim at a PETA enemy who pops up from a hiding place, and click the mouse in order to fire a snowball at them. We included impact noise when the PETA enemies were hit to add humour, as well as incorporating Christmas music to make the game seasonal. We also integrated a ‘Send to a Friend’ email feature so that players can forward it to others.

Within days of the game’s launch it was featured in blogs, forums and websites worldwide, with people commenting on the controversial game and exchanging referral links so that others could play.

PETA also embedded a link to the game into a newsletter which saw it being distributed to over 1 million subscribers.

The game’s popularity peaked with news that an individual working at Governor Sarah Palin’s office called the PETA Policy Department threatening them with legal action unless the game was removed from the website. This story was featured on hundreds of news sites following its announcement on the PETA blog, including Yahoo! News and the Irish Independent.