Viral Leonardo DiCaprio Game, 'The Revenant' Actor Hunts Oscar
While this might be the year Leonardo DiCaprio wins for his masterful work in The Revenant, memes aren't about to stop until Oscar night -- and a new viral online game, Leo's Red Carpet Rampage, sees the star hunting down the award!
For years, the Internet has been obsessed with DiCaprio winning the Academy Award as the actor has consistently proven how great he is with numerous performances. According to The Hollywood Reporter, barely a couple of days after its release last Tuesday, the game created by The Line animation studio is already getting an average of 1,000 plays per minute. The reason behind this project? Everybody hurts for DiCaprio's Oscar struggles.
"I think everybody feels for Leonardo DiCaprio a little bit," Bjorn-Erik Aschim, one of the studio's directors, told the outlet. "He's been nominated quite a lot of times and never really got it. You root for this guy."
The game was Aschim's idea, and it came to him after creating another DiCaprio-related project, a website called DidLeoWinAnOscarYet.com, which consists of a big NO and a gif of a very angry-looking DiCaprio from what looks like The Wolf of Wall Street. Later, Aschim got to work on the project with fellow The Line director Sam Taylor and game designer Max van der Merwe.
Development of the game took three weeks, and the three of them were working on it right before it was officially launched.
As Refinery29 reports, the gameplay of the game is pretty simple. A racing online game, the player is DiCaprio and has to go through a bunch of ordeals to win the Oscar, including beating out the other nominees (including Eddie Redmayne dressed as his character from The Danish Girl), jumping over Lady Gaga and dodging photographers.
There's also one saucy addition to the mix: the impossible challenge of finding the black nominee in a year that has been plagued with racism controversy, after not one person of color was nodded for the acting categories.
In any case, you can play Leo's Red Carpet Rampage here -- but be warned, it's quite addictive!