Nike Virtual Andre (1997)

Web Game - Based on "Virtual Andre" TV Spot

start over

Another game-as-advertisement for Nike. this one was based on a great spot by Weiden and Kennedy called Virtual Andre. We thought it would be cool if you could actually play him.

To play, you click and hold down the mouse until the power of the shot reaches the desired level, then release. And your gun will fire glowing green tennis balls. hit the back wall, and score points.

This game is hard to win. It had to be. That's Nike's star tennis player, Andre Agassi. We couldn't have let it be easy.

So just to make sure we could experience winning, we added a hidden feature - no one knows about this except me, and about 3 other guys... and now you - just hold down the "X" key when Andre returns the ball to you, and it will bounce back to him and score.

We had a rigid rule at Red Sky that programmers not get "creative" with hidden features. Ever. You got fired that way. When I found out the guys did this, I let it slide. I really wanted to win too. Don't tell Nike.

The key creative on this project was Renaud Ternynck, a very talented artist who started at Red Sky very early in it's development. The programmer was the brilliant Marc Blanchard. Marc later went on to code some of Red Sky's most aggressive work.

Notice the words that appear above the game window - the words that change every time Andre moves. Those words were actually supposed to be removed. They were only there to help the programmers verify which Andre animation sequences were being called up by the random generators.

When I saw that I was like, "Leave those there, they're awesome". I mean, this is Virtual Andre- he's a computer program - of course some of his code would spill into view. We should have had more now that i think about it.

That was what we always called a "happy accident" at Red Sky.