COVID19 lockdown was one of the biggest group projects the world has ever seen. Collaboration on a mass scale is pretty difficult, no matter what the task is. In the summer of 2020, the U.S. Air Force had one mission for us: get everyone to stay inside and stop the spread, together.

America ran out of an assortment of weird things - toilet paper, Lysol, hand sanitizer and... puzzles? The stores were bone dry in the fun past time everyone did back in the summers without internet. But this time, we used the internet to our advantage. We introduced to the world the largest digital collaborative puzzle that has ever existed. And it worked - we got 31,774 people to stay inside and solve the puzzle.

Our partners at Active Theory had to find an image with enough resolution to create hundreds of squares. But in order to even be able to work with an image that big, they had to utilize special tech to open the gigantic 1.03 gigapixel image. (For anyone keeping track, a gigapixel image is a digital image composed of one billion pixels! Holy smokes! Read a tech deep dive here.) Turns out, those photos take special equipment to make, and we weren’t able to have productions at the time. We got lucky - it just so happened that a gigapixel photo existed of the U.S. Air Force Museum. The picture was then divided up into puzzle rooms that people could invite their friends and family to play in.

Wild, right?! Million Piece Mission is now a Guinness World Record as the largest digital puzzle. The main lesson I learned was that creating something to bring joy to people can also serve a brand interest, and can be fun.