HOW I CREATED AN AMAZING SUSPENSE FOR A WEEKEND
By: Léopold Adam
Tags: Product Management, Organization, Weekend, Gaming, Suspense

Tired of Facebook group, Whatsapp conversation, Messenger polls… I wanted to do something new and make this weekend special, a weekend we will never forget.

My friend Baptiste had a brilliant idea a couple months ago. He brought his friends to a surprise destination: only he knew the place just until the last minute. He called this concept a DUNK (Destination UNKnown).

He organized everything by himself. Even when they arrived at the destination airport (Olbia in Sardegna), some of his friends still didn’t know where they were!

So… Let’s DUNK! I will bring them to a secret destination. What if the experience before and during the weekend was extraordinary? What if my friends thought they were part of a real game?

Game on!

Let’s start!

I sent the participants (the DUNKIES) a SMS from DUNK to start the game!

In order to stay anonymous, I did not want to use Whatsapp or Messenger which would reveal my identity. Sendinblue, a marketing tool, was my next best option. It would give my friends the experience of suspense.

Fortunately, no one responded STOP

Translation french to english :

Hi DUNKIE,

You have been selected to participate to DUNK.

Here are the rules :

- The destination is unknown

- The DUNKER has full authority

- The DUNKER chooses the next DUNKER

More instructions soon.

DUNK

As soon they received this message, our whatsapp conversation was on fire! The experience has began. The DUNK was on.

Mystery invitation

DUNK SMS are nice gimmicks but I needed something more classy, more impactful, with a touch of mystery… something official. I remembered a scene in the movie The Social Network when Andrew Garfield received an invitation from the Phœnix S.K. Club. The sound when the letter slipped under the door… WOW.

I had to do the same. I designed a personal invitation on Figma, bought black envelops and a white pencil at a paper mill, created custom stamps on the public mail website… I put same energy as I put for my wedding save-the-date cards!

Emmanuel Macron, the french president, is a close friend

When they received it, the experience went to another dimension. Unfortunately I can’t show you the content of the invitation, it is a secret…

Clues, puzzles, tidbits

I always had curiosity about thrillers and suspense movies. Hitchcock is a master and the North By Northwest’s crop-duster scene is one the best suspense scene I ever watched. Why do we feel some much tension?

It’s an emotion response from our brain: hope or fear that a situation happens. Any suspense codes and standards I can rely on to give the same sence of tension to my DUNKIES?

Every week I sent them clues via DUNK SMS to increase the tension and highten the pressure before the DUNK.

First clue : Leonardo DiCaprio.

Leonardo, who finally got an Oscar

Tips: never underestimate your friends’ imagination. Believe me. With this picture, one of my friends discovered the final destination…

One week after, second clue.

I used deep and machine learning methods to create this circle

This circle represents a perimeter of 80 kms. The destination is inside…

Last clue.

I succeeded removing “STOP”

Translation :

Hi DUNKIE,

Last clue: this animal can have two colors depending on his local habitat.

DUNK.

DiCaprio, 80km from Paris, a bicolor animal… Any idea where we were?

Let’s play during the weekend

Having a great experience during the weekend will make you a real game master. Let’s make the game last the whole weekend.

I heard about the Killer game and I knew my friends would like it: a basic prank game!

He actually did it

The rules are simple :

everyone has a mission to fulfill during the weekend

if you succeed and don’t get spotted, you take your target’s mission

the last one, ie who doesn’t get “killed”, wins the game

My target was Adrien. How can I convince him to prepare these cocktails? He can’t even cook pastas…

In these games, you can play different roles: manipulation, threat, kindness, naivety…

Manipulation mixed with kindness is the perfect mix! At 7pm on Saturday night, Adrien showed up in the living room, fresh and ready. I pretended to be very excited about a new cocktail… “Dude, apparently, Jay Z and Puff Daddy want to market it. Let’s try it” (Make sure you accidentally buy all the ingredients).

I told him “I’ll give you the recipe and you make them!”. 30 minutes after, everybody had a delectable cocktail. We called it The DUNK Cocktail.

Recipe: secret.

Clue: squid ink.

And by the way, I fulfilled my mission.

THE REVEAL

I chose a meeting point in Paris at a specific hour. Once all the DUNKIES arrived, I launched a timer for 10 seconds… You have no idea how much I enjoyed the last 10 seconds!

I know it’s not a 10 seconds timer

AND… BOOM : everyone one got a small personalized card that indicated his roomate, his mission and… finally the destination!

He thought it was New York, sorry for him

May the DUNK never ends

All good things do come to an end, except for a DUNK. It must have a second edition… Imagine a Netflix series that ends after the first episode. No way.

I must continue the DUNK. I must pass the relay to another DUNKER. The image is powerful and nobody wants to let down a relay, it is a sign of team spirit. I definitely should have a DUNK relay baton.

So I bought a black relay baton and “printed” the DUNK logo. Ok, I admit it looks really cheap.

Saturday night I organized a vote to choose the next DUNKER. Everybody had a speech that told why he would be the best DUNKER. The guy who was the most convincing earned the privilege to organize the next DUNK.

“If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late”

Secret destination

By the way, where did we go?

We went to Nemours, a small and cute city near Paris. I got you: the destination isn’t sexy as you thought? Maybe. But, since this mystery weekend DUNK, all of my friends want to do it again and talked about the next DUNK.