Land Rover Publishes a Digital Adventure Story

Land Rover North America has released an unusual campaign titled The Vanishing Game, a new interactive digital book written by British author William Boyd.

This full-length adventure thriller, a project created by Y&R New York, follows protagonist Alec Dunbar on a suspenseful driving adventure from London to Scotland. Readers can experience the story through an interactive platform on a custom Tumblr page produced by Tool.

Throughout the story, viewers can engage with key words that are embedded with imagery and video.  For example, when a user selects the keyword "river," they see video footage of a Land Rover crossing a remote waterway in the Scottish Highlands. They can also view snippets of driving journeys from actual Land Rover owners, curated by the brand through the designated hashtag #WellStoried. 

"One of the collateral pleasures of writing The Vanishing Game was that it made me realise how prominently Land Rover has featured in my life, in Africa and Britain, to an almost mythic degree,” says Boyd.

“I remember as a boy being driven in a Land Rover through tropical rain forest to the Volta River in Ghana to fish for freshwater barracuda.  And, as an even younger boy, climbing into my uncle Ronnie’s Land Rover, the Scottish day dawning, as we went out to feed the sheep on his farm. A Land Rover is part of the mental geography of almost every British person, I believe. Consequently, to be asked to write a story in which a Land Rover features was immensely appealing, almost an act of homage. What I tried to achieve was to make the Land Rover an inherent presence in the story, something always there—implicit, strong, solid, reliable, ready to function—very like the part it plays in my memory. Welcome to an icon of motor vehicle history."

Land Rover is promoting The Vanishing Game through a multi-media marketing campaign, and will expand the story narrative with custom content and paid posts on various media. Spotify has also created a custom playlist modelled off the music from Alec’s journey.