ROWAY
Bringing the World Cup trophy home — the Viking way
Project type
Concept / 3D Web Game / AI Experiment
Year
2026
Client
Winsen
My role
Concept / Creative Direction / Design / Development
ROWAY turns Norway’s simplest football chant into a game mechanic.
A Viking crew. A rowing race. One mission: cross the Atlantic, get the World Cup trophy and bring it home to Norway.
The Idea
The idea came after the Norway–Brazil match.
Suddenly, it felt like Norway could do the impossible. At the same time, the whole World Cup adventure could be over almost as quickly as it started.
So I had a thought:
Why wait for Norway to win the trophy?
Let’s go get it ourselves.
By Viking ship.
ROWAY
The concept was hiding inside the country’s name.
Norway has one of the simplest football chants imaginable:
RO! RO! RO!
“Ro” also means row in Norwegian.
So I replaced NOR in NORWAY with RO.
NORWAY → ROWAY
The name became the idea.
And the idea became the game.
The Reframing
Instead of creating another World Cup experience about watching Norway try to bring the trophy home, I turned the supporter into part of the mission.
From cheering for Norway to bring it home.
To bringing it home yourself.
The campaign became a game.
And the chant became the mechanic.
The Game Mechanic
ROWAY is built around one simple interaction:
Hold. Build power. Release. RO!
Release at the right moment and the crew delivers a perfect stroke.
Find the rhythm and the whole Viking ship starts moving faster.
At the back of the ship, Haaland beats the drum and calls RO! Time your strokes with him and the crew builds momentum towards maximum speed.
The chant isn’t decoration added to the experience.
RO is the game.
The Journey
You race Sweden through a Norwegian fjord, steer between gates, dodge ice, collect footballs for turbo and chase your own best performance.
Every part of the experience points towards the same ridiculous objective:
Row to America.
Get the World Cup trophy.
Bring it home to Ullevaal.
Making Rowing Feel Fun
The challenge wasn’t simply making a boat move.
It was making rowing feel good.
The oars hit the water. The crew moves together. Perfect strokes build combos. Haaland’s drum creates rhythm. Footballs trigger turbo. Collisions destroy momentum. Water, sound, particles and camera movement respond to what you do.
Everything is designed to make a very simple interaction feel increasingly satisfying.
Less simulation.
More Viking football arcade game.
From Idea to Playable Product
I created ROWAY independently from concept to finished experience — including the idea, game mechanic, creative direction, design, 3D experience, interaction, sound and development.
The game runs directly in the browser using Three.js and WebGL, with a procedural 3D world, animated Viking crews, dynamic water, game physics, rival AI and a custom sound system.
No installation.
Just press RO.
Building with AI
I also used ROWAY as a personal experiment:
How far could one person take an idea with experience, judgement and agentic AI?
ChatGPT and Codex became part of the production process — helping me explore, build, test and iterate across disciplines that would traditionally require a much larger team.
But AI wasn’t the idea.
And it didn’t decide what was fun.
The real acceleration came from combining new tools with years of experience in concept development, design and digital production.
AI shortened the distance between thinking and making.
The Result
What started as a tiny piece of wordplay became a complete interactive experience.
NORWAY became ROWAY.
A football chant became a game mechanic.
A Viking joke became a playable 3D world.
And bringing the trophy home became something you could actually play.
RO! 🇳🇴
