National Geographic: Saints and Strangers
The real story of Thanksgiving is more deadly than many realize. To build intrigue around the National Geographic’s upcoming Thanksgiving miniseries, Saints and Strangers, we created a narrative game that invited people to see if they could have survived this dark chapter of American history.
Narrative Game x Show Marketing
To market the TV show, we decided to craft a unique interactive web experience—a ‘choose your own adventure’ narrative game, based entirely on the real events that occurred in Plymouth in 1620 that underpinned the series. Players could choose to follow in the footsteps of the Pilgrims, or try to forge a different path. Either way, survival was far from guaranteed.
Game Trailer
Game Narrative
As the sole writer on the project, I wrote the entire script and story for the game. Crafting a cohesive, branching narrative was an epic challenge, requiring hours of mapping the plot points out and seeing how they could connect, developing storylines for multiple characters, and finding ways to give players a sense of control while still telling a historically accurate tale. In the end, this game had 196 possible narrative paths—all rooted in historical fact.
CREDITS
ECDs
Dave Weist
Tim Vaccarino
Creative Directors
Enrique Camacho
Jon Ruby
Copywriter
Sarah Litwin-Schmid
Art Directors
Josh Reece
Mauricio Perez
Creative Technologists
Christian Madden
Costa Boudouva
Awards
Webby Award People’s Voice
One Show Merit