Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code is the premiere program for writing software, with 4.5 million active users. Yet developers are notoriously entrenched in their habits and only 4% subscribe to learning content, leaving the newest tools and capabilities widely unknown and unused. Microsoft’s ask was to expose developers worldwide to the newest features Visual Studio has to offer, challenging new and existing application developers to explore, develop and publish "modern applications" on Windows 10.

We created an online video game only a developer could win. Launched on Bitcoin Pizza Day (celebrating the first cryptocurrency transaction of two pizzas on May 22, 2010), The Last Slice launched on GitHub, promising $10,000 dollars to the first five players to win the game. The game was quickly discovered to be impossible to win. From altering levels to tweaking gameplay mechanics to 3-D algorithmic puzzles to IoT hardware hacking, thousands of devs created 170,000+ versions of our game as they sought the ultimate prize—while logging thousands of hours with new tools in Visual Studio.

Windows programmers are stuck in their ways. Microsoft is releasing lots of new tools, but struggling to get devs to see the point in trying them. Only 4% of this highly specific group actually watched the educational content designed to get the word out—which isn't surprising. 90% of developers self-diagnose as "self-taught" and prefer hands-on trial to any other learning method. So to get them using the tools without even realizing it, we turned to 80s video games, Reddit, Github, a Bitcoin pizza legend, and probably the nerdiest, most technical branded challenge ever conceived.

The Last Slice game was hosted on GitHub, a repository for developers, as a video game project built in Visual Studio. Delivering the pizza within the game required complex code alterations and completed the first of three challenges. Challenge two required the creation of a word search algorithm to identify pizza toppings on a 3-D cube. The top 100 developers on the leaderboard received an IoT kit in the mail with the third and final challenge to program a pizza delivery chatbot and claim the long-lost Bitcoin pizza tip of $10,000.

Among a narrowly targeted group, thousands of Windows developers worldwide created 170,000+ versions of the Last Slice game while logging hundreds of thousands of hours in Microsoft Visual Studio.