COGS & MARVEL

Banshees the Game


SNAPSHOT

165k page views in a week

292 press articles

Thousands of global players

Infinite craic

How does an Irish-founded experiential agency show up on St Patrick’s Day? We’re no stranger to telling a good story through immersive tech, entertainment, and gamification, but we needed to find the right story to tell. Some might wonder if the world really needed a retro video game adaptation of The Banshees of Inisherin, but with a workforce composed largely of Irish people, nerds, and Irish nerds, it seemed like an obvious choice.

From the pixel art, to the original soundtrack of chiptune Irish trad music, we built our 8-bit homage from scratch, giving the darkly comic tale of Irish emotional repression a joyfully over-simplified, over-saturated makeover: Banshees the Game.

"There’s a plucky retro soundtrack, which is always a treat, and Inisherin’s comedy isn’t lost in translation… I’ll be spending the rest of today trying to beat the game and see its last few jokes."

-Rock Paper Shotgun

Capturing the Zeitgeist
St Patrick’s Day 2023 landed at something of an auspicious moment for Irish culture on the international stage. The Academy Awards, scheduled just four days prior to our national holiday, represented an unprecedented acknowledgement of Irish talent. A record 14 nominees hailed from our island, including a quarter of all of the acting nominees. As noted director and Star Trek-ruiner JJ Abrams put it, “seven million people on that island, and all of them are nominated.”

With two massive green waves colliding, we saw an opportunity to harness the excitement of a unique cultural moment, generate some buzz, and most importantly, ensure that the craic remained mighty. What we did not expect, however, was just how much a game about one man’s quest for a quiet pint would resonate with a global audience.

Banshees: The Game went viral. With 150k unique players all competing for the high score, publications around the world started taking notice. Everywhere from GQ to NME, from Campaign to Gamespot, the global attention hit us like a severed finger chucked at a cottage door.

IMPACT

There’s more than one way to tell a story, and representing a brand narrative through an unexpected optic can really strike a chord with a wider audience; doubly so when that narrative can ride the wave of the cultural zeitgeist.  

What story are you trying to tell?

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