AKQA
Speedgate
Invention
/ 2019
The first sport imagined by AI
In the era of GPT 1.0, we built a model to create a new sport—imagined by AI.
What began as a humble homegrown experiment for a local conference grew first into a passion, then into a local phenomenom, and finally into a global press topic generating half a billion completely organic impressions and spawned word-of-mouth league growth in 50 nations around the world.
THE BIRTH OF A SPORT
We started by feeding 400 sports and over 7,300 sport rules into a recurrent neural network (RNN), generating over 1,000 sport concepts, which were then refined and used to retrain the network until three testing candidates were produced. The AI started to pick apart recurring themes across sports, refining the gameplay and optimizing for shared characteristics across the top sports in history. Finally, names for the sport were generated from the key words remaining in the candidate game frameworks.
A Deep Convolusional Generative Adversarial Network (DCGAN) was then fed over 10,000 sports icon images to generate graphic direction and even a sport motto for Speedgate league branding
SPEEDGATE GENERATED 800 MILLION IMPRESSIONS WITH ZERO DOLLARS SPENT AND THERE ARE TEAMS NOW REGISTERED IN 50 COUNTRIES
Creds
Agency: AKQA
Creative Director: Whit Jenkins
ACD: Brad Hall + Riaad Van Der Merwe
AI Lead: Kathryn Webb
UX: Yanci Wu
Design: Gustav Holtz + Makenna Combs + Matt Firman
Strategy: Pierre Axel-Pejouan
Live Tournament VFX: Dot Dot Dash
PM: Ryan Rossi
