About

In early 2010, the Mars corporation asked Proximity BBDO to create a fun and viral gaming experience to strengthen the M&M’s brand-image on social networks. The client suggested (and insisted) on a 4-squared type game. We knew this alone would not have the power to convert, so we decided to warp the traditional 4-squared template into a new and exciting shape: M&M’s Squared.

In traditional 4-squared, once a player gets 4 cells in a row, the game is over. We decided to take a leaf out of Tetris’ book and introduced “cascading”. If you manage to get 4 M&M’s in a row, that row would be removed from the game and all higher cells would shift down, perhaps triggering another 4-in-a-row event.

We added powerbars to give the game more of a beat-’em-up mechanic, and finally a Peggle-esque “Feverbar” on top, which dictated the flow of the game. The more rows players scored, the more the feverbar would fill up and the more “damage” your opponent would suffer.

On top of all that we added 4 distinct powerups: Napalm, Laser-strikes, Bombs and health-kits.

Social

We decided from the start that we were going to fully utilize the strengths of social networking to promote our game. We licensed Smartfox server to handle the multiplayer capabilities and together with our social layer, which allowed users to sign up using either their Facebook or Netlog accounts,  we had effectively created a fully cross-platform multiplayer framework.