Manchester United

Immersive gaming experience inspired by Manchester United's most memorable victories

Manchester United asked for a football-themed game to fill a set of booths in their new Beijing space — roughly six-person capacity, built for projection. The rest of the concept was ours to define.

The concept that stuck: Guitar Hero meets Mario, with a football as the controller. Once that idea held, I designed the game logic, mechanics, scoring, and level progression, along with supporting pieces like the bench interface, where players register, form teams, and choose their game.

Players kick a motion-tracked ball at game elements projected across three walls and the floor, tracked in real time by an array of infrared cameras.

Designing for a walk-up audience meant building for a wide range of skill without making the game feel flat for confident players or intimidating for first-timers. Each level offers three difficulty settings and gets harder as it goes, and the six levels themselves escalate in difficulty as players move through them.

The harder problem was tonal — making a game that's fun to play, exciting to watch, and challenging without tipping into frustration, inside a small projected box that can easily disorient people. Some of the real design work was in the small decisions: whether forced perspective should read correctly from the player's position or the bench's, how an object visually hands off from the wall projection to the floor as it approaches.

Get the balance right, and the box disappears — for a few minutes, you're not watching a game, you're inside one.

Created at Local Projects
My Role: Lead Designer (+ Experience Design)