The world of beer is quite crowded. At every bar there are tons of taps, and at every beer festival enthusiasts are greeted by thousands of the same white tents. Our challenge was to help a small regional brewer — Big Boss Brewing — stand out in the sea of suds and win over new customers.

Our strategy was to turn first-time beer trial at bars and festivals into an unforgettable experience. And what’s more unforgettable than a battle to the death via an arcade game that pours you beer?

Beer and video games were meant for each other. The beercade marries them into one experience that reflects the irreverent nature of the Big Boss Brewing brand. Every component of The Last Barfighter game was developed specifically for Big Boss.

The five game characters — Bad Penny, Angry Angel, Blanco Diablo, Hell’s Belle and High Roller — are named for their signature beers and designed to reflect their beer labels. The cabinet was custom-built for the video screens, controls and beer keg. Then it was wrapped with hand-illustrated panels to encourage players at festivals to unleash their inner beer warriors.

To encourage people to sample Big Boss beers at festivals and bars, we created the beercade: a unique arcade-machine-slash-beer-dispenser. It allows tasters to fight for their beer in a custom game called The Last Barfighter.

To play, tasters insert their beer cups and choose from five characters representing Big Boss’s signature brews. They fight three rounds with their opponent, and the last one standing receives a trial-sized pour from a keg inside the machine. Our goals were to boost trial of Big Boss beers, increase distribution requests and drive visits to bigbossbrewing.com via a promotional video featuring the game.

Since the unveiling of the beercade at Big Boss’s Oktoberfest event, they have experienced a 200% increase in distributor requests. The beercade has generated over 100 million PR impressions equaling more than $1.1m in earned media, with $0 in paid media spent. NBC News called it “a flash of genius,” while geekologie.com said simply, “Damn yeah!”

After the release of a promotional video for the game on YouTube, site traffic to bigbossbrewing.com increased 400% and daily page views increased 254%.