• by Karl Greenberg , October 10, 2007

Toyota has created a game for Xbox that features the Toyota Yaris compact car. But it isn't a racing game or a test-drive game or a virtual version of the driving experience. Rather, the Xbox 360 video game, "Yaris," is a free brand-supported shoot-'em-up in which players kill enemies, dodge obstacles and try to finish in one piece.

The game became available Wednesday for a year to U.S. and Canadian consumers on Xbox Arcade.

Others have created or branded downloadable games for platforms like Xbox, including Ford and Volvo, and automakers have been doing vehicle integration in games like "Gran Turismo." But Sam Bergen, emerging-media specialist at Toyota's agency, Saatchi & Saatchi, says the point was to support the Yaris brand by infusing the game with characters and the spirit of broader campaign, rather than giving a virtual drive demo.

"It really is a brand play, and throughout the game characters from the advertising show up, like the Mexican wrestler characters, and the gasoline spider," he says, alluding to characters featured in ads for Yaris.

He says the game is highly targeted to the gaming audience, with advertising on sites like MySpace, AOL, Yahoo Games, Yugo and MTV, and that ads will feature a 15-second online video trailer that will run within banners. The game will be touted on Xbox Live.

Bergen says that the genesis of the game was the agency's work with institutions like Redmond, Wash.-based DigiPen Institute of Technology, an accredited university focused on digital game programming and design. "We gave Yaris to the kids to develop cell phone games with."

"Leading up to this game, we were doing a lot of activity with influencers and trendsetters in the gaming world; we wanted to create an awesome piece of content to put in peoples' hands that would be a great branding unit; Xbox was perfect because they have around seven million users."

He says those seven million subscribers are a good target for Toyota. "Gamers are open-minded, very tech-savvy, and always weighing their options. Games are all about problem solving. Yaris is a very practical, highly efficient vehicle, an anti-econo box. The vehicle is well designed, and part of the strategy was democratization of design, and that's the idea behind the game--giving it away for free to everyone."