Turning fifty square metres into a Pepsi-fied MrBeast challenge at Riyadh Season’s Beast Land.
How It Started
Riyadh Season 2025 opened Beast Land, a 188,000-square-metre, MrBeast-inspired entertainment zone packed with rides, challenges, restaurants, and more competitive energy than two 5s circling the same 10.
Pepsi had a 10-by-5-metre experiential space booked inside it, and the ask was to build an immersive challenge under the “Thirsty For More” platform; something that would pull in Gen Z and millennial visitors, get them actually competing, and hand them something worth posting afterwards.
The brief arrived with a thought-starter of five pit-stop ideas built around vaults, pressure chambers and golden walls, all of which were perfectly fine, and fine is exactly the thing that vanishes inside a 188,000-square-metre park where every square inch is fighting for the same attention.
So we went a different way with it.
The Thinking
The thing we noticed about MrBeast’s challenge format is that the ones people actually remember aren’t the clever ones; they’re the physical ones, the ones where you watch someone duck and dodge and leap and visibly strain not to lose. That’s the kind of clip that stops you scrolling and makes you elbow whoever’s next to you and say “I could do that.”
You almost certainly couldn’t, but you’d want to anyway, and that wanting is the whole game.
The brief was reaching for escape-room energy; we wanted game-show energy instead. An escape room is a cerebral thing that rewards patience, and the crowd at Beast Land hadn’t turned up to be patient; they’d turned up to compete.
So the concept went physical: two stages, one clear journey through them, and a name doing most of the heavy lifting.
GET FIZZICAL
Move it. Fizz it. Win it.
The whole creative territory lived inside that one word. “Fizzical” handed us the pun, the energy and the brand link in a single hit, Pepsi’s fizz welded straight onto the physicality of the event, and every touchpoint got to play with it; fizzique for your form, imfizzible for the laser challenge, Fizz Release for the win button. That one naming call quietly unlocked the entire vocabulary the experience would speak in.
What I Built
The Experience: A Two-Stage Gauntlet
The 10-by-5 space was laid out as a sequential journey; you enter at one end, work your way to the other, and walk out rewarded either way.
Stage 1: The Fizzing Floor
A floor-is-lava game in Pepsi colours. Blue tiles are safe, red tiles are hazards, white tiles are stationary safe zones. Two players step on, the tiles start shifting at random, and a Fizz Release button glows green somewhere out on the floor; reach it and you clear the stage, miss it and you’re out, though you still leave with a cold Pepsi in hand.
Stage 2: Mission Imfizzible
A laser-beam room inspired by, let’s say, a certain hilariously short celebrity’s historic espionage performance. Brand-coloured beams fill the space in blue, red and white, and some of them move, so participants duck, dodge and thread their way to the clear button, with every run throwing up a different obstacle course.
The Tunnel linked the two stages, a transitional beat that let the anticipation build between games.
The Bar & Rewards Zone anchored the exit, where win or lose, everyone walks away with an ice-cold Pepsi.
Winning, though, unlocked tiers:
- Cleared Stage 1: Limited-edition can sleeve, sticker pack, or Pepsi Pop Badge
- Cleared Stage 2: Mini metal keychain can, limited-edition tote, Bluetooth speaker, or a Pepsi x Beast Land bucket hat
- Fastest Overall (Top 3 on the Leaderboard): A Golden Pepsi coin, SAR 20,000 for first place, SAR 15,000 for second, and SAR 10,000 for third
The leaderboard ran for the entire activation, with names going up on a public scoreboard you could read from outside the space.
The Writing
On top of the experience design and the naming, I wrote the full creative deck, 54 slides of concept narrative, experience flow, engagement rationale, reward tiers, spatial journey and communication lines. The deck’s job was to sell why the idea works, not only to walk through what happens, and it did.
The Space
The exterior carried a giant 3D Pepsi can, a rotating golden coin, LED-wrapped metal bands, a vertical screen and the leaderboard, all of it built to pull people in from right across Beast Land.
The Arabic line, خليك متعطش لفرصة ربح ذهب, “Stay thirsty for a chance to win gold,” tied the “Thirsty For More” platform straight to the grand-prize mechanic.
What Happened
The activation ran the full 45 days of Beast Land, from the 13th of November to the 27th of December 2025.
100% gift depletion. Every reward tier bar the Pepsi cups was completely cleared out, which only happens with sustained, high-volume participation across a month and a half.
Half the visitors were 18 to 30. Pepsi’s core target, exactly. The rest split across 31 to 45 at 30% and 45-plus at 20%, on a roughly 60/40 male-to-female ratio, so the space wasn’t just catching the right people, it was catching everyone.
Repeat participation became the defining pattern. The competitive leaderboard and the tiered rewards kept pulling visitors back to beat their own times and climb the rankings, and the two-game sequence held them longer per visit.
The social amplification took care of itself. People kept dragging friends and family back with them, and word of mouth turned into its own growth loop.
VIP visitors singled out both the entertainment and the brand integration, and sentiment stayed consistently positive across the whole run.
A Beast of a Project
This one came in as a dead-simple request: make people do stuff, MrBeast style. It then went through a frankly ridiculous number of iterations, some complicated, some bespoke, one of which somehow involved a giant gacha machine.
Having spent enough time in the experiential game by now, I’ve learned that the simplest, most familiar activities are usually brilliant already; all they really need is a bit of dress-up, a little personality, and a heavy splash of production quality on top.
And this fifty-square-metre box inside a 188,000-square-metre park held its own comfortably, on the strength of being recognisable, repeatable and worth coming back to, rather than being the biggest thing in the park.
Project: Pepsi x Beast Land
Role: Concept, Copy, Naming, Engagement Design, Rewards, Deck & Presentation
Year: 2025
Agency: Mindspace
Client: PepsiCo / Portfolio Concentrate Solutions