For the past four years, toy executives, designers, marketers, and tech experts at the Hasbro
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Hasbro is revealing the end result of that work today, with the release of a video showing the first competitive game of a sport they are calling Nerfball. The full game has been posted on a Hasbro website.
Hasbro hinted at its Nerfball project a year ago in a press release that said it had partnered with former NFL star Donald Driver to launch an organized team sport. It teased that the new sport would combine the excitement of paintball with the speed and agility of basketball, but supplied no real details, and kept those details secret until now, requiring all athletes, potential licensing partners, and observers to sign non-disclosure agreements.
Hasbro recruited and trained college athletes to play an exhibition game last week in Florida in front of a select group of Hasbro executives and employees, athletes, and potential licensing partners.
Hasbro now is hoping the social-media popular athletes who played in that first game – including Driver and Nerf and blaster influencer Luke Goodman; high school basketball stars Kiyan Anthony and Isaiah Elohim; college basketball stars Trace Young, Meechie Johnson, Jada Williams, Hannah White, and Lyric Swann; college lacrosse stars Sofia Chepenik and Mitchell Pelke; college track and field stars Jessica Gardner and Dontavious Hill; and college softball star Maya Brady – will help make Nerfball go viral, with their Instagram and TikTok accounts.
Here is a link to a Nerf Instagram post about the game.
There aren’t any reliable stats on the size of the Nerf and blaster gamer community, but Nerf is one of Hasbro’s top brands. The company sold 26 million Nerf and Super Soaker products in the United States last year, and it has sold enough foam darts over the past five years to circle the globe four times.
Hasbro unlocks hit detection
The news today contains another reveal that could excite the massive Nerf and blaster fan community even more. Hasbro is announcing it has solved something that has been a Holy Grail for blaster enthusiasts – hit detection. Nerfball is played with suits enabled with “smart foam” that registers when a player has been hit by a dart and can relay that information to a digital score board.
“When they told me about the suits I was like ‘No way, that’s not possible’,” said Goodman, who is known for his popular Out of Darts videos that draw thousands of views on YouTube and TikTok.
Nerfball, said Goodman, who played and coached in the exhibition game, “is easily the best competitive game mode that I’ve seen” for blaster play.
Hasbro is playing the long game with its Nerfball strategy. The general public will have little opportunity to play Nerfball in the immediate future, and there isn’t any related merchandise immediately available for sale. But Hasbro is hoping this is the start of what will be a long-term sports franchise with the potential for youth leagues, and perhaps even professional competition.
The company is also hoping Nerfball will keep youthful Nerf enthusiasts playing with Nerf products longer, win over new players, and eventually drive sales of lots and lots of Nerf products.
The goal is bigger than immediate toy sales, said Tim Kilpin, president of Toys, Licensing, and Entertainment at Hasbro, in an exclusive interview.
“It’s about building that connectivity with the brand for a broader array of fans over a longer period of time,” Kilpin said. Creating those connections can pay dividends – and sell products – for years to come, he said.
Hasbro executives have been envisioning a bigger future for the 54-year-old Nerf brand for some time, and have done licensing deals with action park and theme park operators and explored possible Nerf-themed TV shows. But they now view Nerfball as one of their best ideas to grow the brand.
“We always felt we could build a sport that would work well for the youngest consumer, but was intended to keep that older consumer in the Nerf brand and give him a reason to stay and compete throughout their teens and 20s and 30,” Adam Kleinman, senior vice president and general manager for Nerf at Hasbro, said in an interview before the announcement.
Hasbro, Kleinman, said, had two separate but complimentary goals as it was creating Nerfball. One was to master hit detection, the second was to invent a sport.
Smart foam tech in Nerfball suits
Nerf partnered with Utah-based company XO-NANO, which makes smart foam that can register impacts, to create Nerfball uniforms that know when a dart hits a foam pad, and can send that information to a scoreboard.
When the Nerf team began developing the game, they drew inspiration from traditional sports as well as video games, and took their mission as seriously as if they were James Naismith creating the first game of basketball.
The guiding principles when the Nerf team set out to create a sport, Kleinman said, were it had to be “really fun to play”, and in this age of social media and YouTube videos, also “really fun to watch.”
They also wanted a modern sport with short games for shorter attention spans by viewers.
“We live in a world of much more short-form content,” Kleinman said. “So creating a sport that was two, three or four hours to play didn’t feel like a modern approach to sport,” he said.
Short-attention span sports
Nerfball is played in four, four-minute long quarters. With timeouts and breaks the entire game takes between 30 and 45 minutes.
The development team decided, Kleinman said, that a core element in any popular sport is a ball, or an object that gets moved toward a goal and that viewers can focus on as they watch the game.
They came up with a ball that can be kicked or thrown while the players also are shooting Nerf darts or running for cover to avoid being hit by opponents.
Players who are hit are out of the game until they run to the opposite end of the field and “respawn” – video gaming lingo for re-entering a game after being hit.
Hasbro plans to give the general public a chance to play the game starting next year, at the NERF Action Xperience, an indoor sports park at Westfield Garden State Plaza in Paramus, N.J.
Hasbro also plans to sell equipment Nerf fans can use to play the game at home, in their own backyards. It said it plans to announce additional details about how to purchase Nerfball gear soon, and would-be players can sign up for updates on the hasbropulse.com/nerfball site.
Official Nerfball is played using a Nerf Pro Stryfe X blaster, Nerf Pro Darts, inflatable barriers to use as cover while shooting, and a special Nerf Pro League ball. Players score one point every time they hit an opposing partner with a dart, and six points when they throw the ball into a net on the field.
Hasbro also created an official rulebook for the sport spelling out details like preferred size of the field (155 feet by 85 feet), the length of the game (four 4-minute quarters) and how many darts a player can use (60 per quarter).
The rulebook recommends two teams of five players, but in the first exhibition game each team had six players in addition to a player/coach who could sub in for other players, as well as an assistant coach who manages substitutions and gameplay while the coach is playing.
Driver, after playing in the exhibition game, said via email that players of all types and abilities can play Nerfball. “You don’t need the strenuous athleticism,” he said. “You just need the desire to have fun and compete.”
“There’s no denying that Nerfball can be a competitive sport,” Driver said. “It truly allows you to use different types of tools, social skills, physical development, confidence, and teamwork.”
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