Sprite built a well-made piece of web design for a soda ad, worth the four minutes, even if the quiz at the end oversells itself.
I scanned the QR code on a can of Sprite Zero Sugar mostly out of curiosity, expecting the usual four-second redirect to a sweepstakes form. Instead I landed on Sprite.com/zerolimits and got dropped into the Hall of Zero Limits, a fully rendered 3D space built to promote Marvel Studios' Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, somewhere between a museum and a research lab, with a narrator waiting to walk me through it.
The look of the place does more work than most branded sites bother with, Afrofuturism crossed with Art Deco, holographic panels, gold trim on dark backgrounds, a custom typeface built to look Wakandan with its own transition animations. None of it reads like a bought template reskinned for a soda campaign.
“A soda can usually gets you for about six seconds. This one held people for four minutes.”
What kept me poking around was the materials. Convincing gold and metal in real-time WebGL has been a hard rendering problem for years, and instead of faking it with a cheap shader trick, the team built its own HDRIs, full 360-degree lighting maps, just to get the reflections right. The plants, statues, and a lemon tree tucked into one corner clearly started as sketches and DALL-E concept renders (I'd bet money one prompt was close to "matte painting of the hallways of Wakanda University, church-like light, futuristic African") before getting rebuilt properly in 3D. AI art as a starting point instead of a finished product, on a corporate budget, a year before everyone was arguing about it.
I spent longer looking at that lemon tree than any reasonable person should. It has no function. Someone just decided the hall needed one.
The Wisdom Guide, the narrator character, could easily have been a mascot bolted onto a loading screen and mostly isn't. It paces the visit, nudging you between sections instead of talking over whatever you're already looking at, and I never felt herded through a funnel even though, structurally, I obviously was. The Origin Stories it leads you to are the best five minutes here, short interviews with the BIPOC creatives, several of them women, who worked on the film, and they'd hold up with the Sprite branding stripped off entirely.
The quiz at the end is the thin part. It promises to reveal your creative gifts and delivers a handful of encouraging outcomes shuffled around, the horoscope approach, results that would tell almost anyone they've got a knack for storytelling. Mine said storytelling. My guess is yours will too.
It's worth saying plainly that a company selling flavored soda water paid for a site framed around empowering young Black creators, and that's not a knock on the people who actually built it well. Four minutes and change is a long time to hold someone's attention off the back of a can, and the numbers back it up: 1.75 million people showed up and stayed. That dwell time is a real result. It doesn't automatically mean people walked away thinking harder about the creators the campaign says it's championing, and it's fair to hold both of those thoughts at once.