Sprite built a genuinely well-made piece of web design for a soda ad, worth the four minutes, even if the quiz at the end oversells what it's actually doing.
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 is doing more work than most branded sites bother with. It leans on Afrofuturism crossed with Art Deco, minimal outlines, holographic panels, gold trim on dark backgrounds, and a custom typeface built to look Wakandan, complete with its own transition animations when menus slide in. None of it reads like a template someone bought and reskinned for a soda campaign.
“A soda can usually gets you for about six seconds. This one held people for four minutes.”
The part that actually impressed me is what's holding the material together. Getting gold and metal to look convincing in real-time WebGL has been a genuinely hard 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 even 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. The AI art is a starting point here, not the finished product, and it shows.
A soda can usually gets you for about six seconds. This one held people for four minutes.
The Wisdom Guide, the host character narrating the tour, could easily have been a mascot bolted onto a loading screen. It mostly isn't. It actually paces the visit, nudging you from section to section instead of just talking over whatever you're already looking at, and I never felt like I was being herded through a funnel even though, structurally, I obviously was.
The Origin Stories are the best five minutes on the whole site. They're a set of short interviews with the BIPOC creatives, several of them women, who worked on the film, and they'd hold up as content on their own with the Sprite branding stripped off entirely. That's rare for anything built around a can of soda.
The Inspiration Garden is a nice-looking detour, but the quiz at the end is where the experience runs thin. It promises to reveal your own creative gifts, and what it actually delivers is a handful of encouraging outcomes shuffled around, the kind of result that would tell almost anyone they've got a knack for storytelling. It's not a bad idea. It just doesn't follow through on what it's selling.
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.