Play’n GO CMO Ebba Arnred shared insights about the company’s initiative that included the launch of Garga as the first slot character in space for the launch of Reactoonz 100.

Play’n GO has recently announced that its iconic characters, Garga, has set a world record by becoming the first slot character in space. To celebrate the launch of Reactoonz 100, the company’s character reached a max altitude of 37,753 metres (117,300 ft) in a two-hour flight.

To learn more about the inspiration behind this campaign, how the company is measuring success for this initiative from a marketing and brand standpoint, and how it will influence the 2026 roadmap in terms of audience engagement, regional expansions, or product innovation, Focus Gaming News spoke with Play’n GO CMO Ebba Arnred.

Ebba, the launch of Garga as the first slot character in space is a bold and imaginative step. Could you walk us through the inspiration behind this campaign and what you hoped to achieve for Play’n GO’s brand with it?

I’m glad you enjoyed Garga’s journey, we certainly had a lot of fun with it! 

I think that’s a core component of our brand and our work – fun – and it’s easy to forget that sometimes due to the pace of this industry.

There are thousands of games released each year by hundreds of studios in the online casino space alone. And everyone is trying to achieve the same thing: make their game memorable to players so that not only do they select to play it from the vast sea of new games to choose from but return to it again and again because they enjoyed the experience.

Play’n GO is blessed with the best marketing department in the industry, though we haven’t always had the chance to truly showcase our creativity as much as I would like.

The Garga in Space idea was something we discussed over a year ago when thinking of how best to mark our 20th anniversary this year, but we felt it would be more impactful as part of a game launch, so we regrettably shelved it. 

It was such a great idea that we couldn’t stop thinking about it and really worried that someone else in the industry would get to space first. But then our wonderful games team told us that Reactoonz 100 featuring the iconic character Garga was coming in October and we finally had our moment.

For us, this campaign is both a lighthearted and fun campaign that will (hopefully!) be memorable for our operator partners and players alike, but also a real statement of intent. 

We’ve spent the better part of eight years since the launch of the original Reactoonz game building equity into the Reactoonz characters, making Garga a star in the process.

That was no accident. We have one of, if not the, strongest portfolio of IP in the industry. Harnessing the power of the IP through campaigns like Garga in Space makes sense for both the business and the brand.

How did you leverage this unique space-mission narrative across your product portfolio, marketing channels and operator partnerships to maximise impact?

This campaign was very fun to work on, and although I do believe there should be space in every business to do things that are ostensibly ‘just for fun’, there was a clear business objective behind Garga in Space – Make Reactoonz 100 the biggest launch of the year.

We felt that for this campaign to have the biggest impact, and to achieve our goal of making Reactoonz 100 the biggest launch of the year, the Space part needed to remain secret. 

Even internally. 

We had a secret name for this project, and information was shared strictly on a need-to-know basis. The number of people who knew about the idea at the beginning could be counted on one hand, and I refused to even tell the other members of our senior steering committee what we were working on. Eventually we had to widen that circle of people to include our fabulous video and graphic design team, internal communications etc, but everyone did a fantastic job of keeping the secret and I’m pretty sure that no one was expecting to see Garga 36,000 metres above the earth.

Despite not knowing about the Space journey, our commercial team was told something big was going to happen, and they duly did a great job in lining up exclusivity partners who got the game a couple of weeks ahead of network release.