Netflix Germany launches a live hunt for Pablo Escobar on Twitch and Facebook
The second season of the critically acclaimed series "Narcos" was released on September 2nd, 2016, and revolves around the legendary hunt for the Columbian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar. Netflix Germany invited four popular gamers to hunt down Escobar themselves by competing in a number of challenges, both physically and mentally challenging. The whole event was titled 'Jagd auf Escobar' (Hunt for Escobar) and was streamed live on Twitch and Facebook at 6pm on September 25th, 2016.
The hunt for Pablo Escobar / Netflix, Inc.
The live challenges took place in a studio in Berlin, which was set up as a DEA office. At first, a voice over of the series' DEA agent Steve Murphy welcomed viewers and host Rewinside, who is also a gamer with 1.6 million subscribers on YouTube, introduced the two competing teams. Team #Plata was compiled of the two gamers Benx and VeniCraft and the other two gamers Hardi and Krankcrafter formed team #Plomo. Both of the teams had to compete in a number of challenges for which they received points.
The whole live event was structured in such a way that the challenges depicted the various stages of the hunt for Escobar - from searching his prison La Catedral, over analyzing the clues up to chasing him in the city of Medellin. Prior to each challenge, the voice over of Murphy explained the rules and provided historic background information. Actual season two clips were also integrated, which again contributed to a better understanding of which roles the challenges played in the hunt for Escobar.
During the first game for example, which was titled 'La Catedral', the teams were told that they had to search Escobar's prison for clues. They were presented with a picture of his belongings placed in a cupboard and had to remember their arrangements. Afterwards, the teams had to arrange the items in the correct order.
Other challenges asked the teams to finish puzzle games as fast as possible or to weight correct amounts of 'Cocaine'. Their Spanish skills were also tested.
One of the games that required more physical action was 'Maratón de Medellin' during which they had to track down the hide-outs of Escobar. While one team member was equipped with a map of Medellin, the other one had to navigate through Medellin and find the different spots by running on a specially designed treadmill.
Throughout the entire two-hour event viewers had the opportunity to interact with both teams and support them by providing them with tips via the comment sections of the streams. Each team had a screen, which showed the comments filtered by hashtag, meaning team #Plata could only see comments using the hashtag #Plata and vice versa. The Facebook and Twitch streams generated over 86K views combined.
Henner Herwig Jürgens is the Managing Director and Cofounder of VAST MEDIA, a media research and consulting company based in Berlin that provides international television industry leaders with qualitative competitive market analysis of digital entertainment and content marketing.
You can access the Found Remote hub here. Sign up to receive The Drum's Found Remote newsletter.